Fiction: The mind's luxury?

“One more dunkin to go. Down I went and went back up again, into light and air... By the third time up, therefore, I had been reborn: as a fountain. From between my cherubic legs a stream of crystalline liquid shot into the air. Lit from the dome above, its yellow scintillance arrested everyone’s attention. The stream rose in an arc... it struck Father Mike right in the middle of the face.” — “Middlesex,” Jeffrey Eugenides (2002)

When I read the lines above in Eugenides’ masterpiece, I felt like I was there on the front pew witnessing the baptism of Calliope Stephanides (main character in the novel) mentally applauding a perfect scene juxtaposing patriarchal faith and unapologetic Mother Nature having made an unusual decision. Calliope was a hermaphrodite and while everyone thought she was a girl at birth, this baptismal scene was a foreshadowing of the existence of some kind of engineering involving inner piping, not female.

The entire Middlesex did not relegate me to a mere spectator to nature’s sport involving the tossing of the ball back and forth in the gender court. Instead, it made me a player, albeit a silent one, if I did not count the rage, shock, compassion, understanding, empathy that swathed my insides, in turns and overlaps, like monsoon storms. That is the experience of a good novel that I constantly chase. But now I ask, after I have read the last line of every fiction I have read, would the non-fiction that is my life, remain the same?

Keith Oathley thinks not. He wrote an article in the November/December (2011) issue of Scientific American Mind entitled “In The Minds of Others” that focused on research that he and other psychologists and neuroscientists have done on what reading fiction does to our personalities.  

For the most part, people, including scientists, thought that reading fiction was just a mere past time, a fanciful engagement with imaginary characters to fill your resting mind. But some scientists have always suspected that a fictional narrative invades our personalities in ways we did not think would be possible. Now, studies, including brain scans of people while reading fiction, have shown that indeed, fiction makes us more socially open — we empathize more because we understand other lives better.

Studies that Oathley cited included one that had readers reading short stories while their brains were under MRI. The scans showed that their minds were “re-enacting” what they were reading, showing that indeed fiction is an intimate experience with your own emotions as they come out as a response to the story and to its characters. They also conducted experiments and found that those who read more fiction rated significantly higher on social skills. They were also aware of the possibility that the more socially open people were really given to reading fiction more than the relatively socially closed ones so they tested personalities first and controlled for this. Still, the results were indeed, reading fiction significantly contributed to social skills.

As an aside, I think it is worth noting that studies have also tested whether this positive contribution happens to people who watch a lot of TV with all its fictional shows. The finding was that this transformation you get from reading fiction is NOT what you get from watching TV. Apparently, the connections involved in your brain when you read fiction, is not the same as watching fiction. Maybe this is also why it is such a big challenge to translate a good book to a film. Those who have read the novel already have the splay of emotions stamped on them by the written literary work. And the resulting film would have to measure up to every splatter of tear, burst of laughter and everything else, to match that emotional map already carved within you by the novel.

With research by Oathely and others, science has revealed that reading imagined work is not a mental ladder to pure fancy. It is in fact, your lifeline to the reel of your real life, as it is intricately reaches out or squiggles out of, in a myriad of ways, to and from other lives. Fictional stories are ways to string the connections we need to make in order to understand and empathize with the labyrinth of lives of which we are part. They are made up, yes, but human-made which means it issues from a common consciousness we have so that we can experience our emotions without having to actually commit every act that gives rise to them. Thus, we learn how they fit into the human soul, wherever body and life it finds itself in. 

Hurray for fiction. Hurray for non-fiction science heralding fiction.

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