Here is the full transcript of Rita Carter’s talk titled “Why Reading Matters” at TEDxCluj conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Power of Reading
If I came and told you there is this one thing you could all do which would make you more imaginative, make your memory better, probably improve your personal relationships, and make you a nicer person, you would probably be very skeptical. And even more so if I said it costs nothing and probably everybody in this room can already do it.
Now, you will probably have guessed by now that I’m talking about reading – there’s a clue in the title. But I’m not talking about the sort of reading that we all know is incredibly important; that is, the sort of reading we do for education, the sort of reading we do for administration, the sort of reading which we have to do nowadays just to get through life.
I’m talking rather about fiction, stories, narratives – the sort of reading where you are reading things from inside another person’s head, where it takes you right inside the character’s emotions and feelings and actions so you are seeing it from their perspective. That’s the sort of reading which is at best thought of as pleasurable and at worst quite often as a waste of time.
I mean, I remember my mother telling me that when she was a child she was crazy about books but that her father once ripped a novel out of her hands, saying that “If you have to read, at least read something useful.” What I want to tell you today is that, surprisingly, fiction is very useful indeed, in ways that we probably never previously suspected. In fact, it’s more important, probably, than any other form of reading.
The Impact of Fiction
And I have some new evidence, which comes rather surprisingly out of the brain sciences, to support that, which I’ll come to. First of all, some not-so-new evidence: in 2013 there was a series of experiments done by two New York psychologists, David Kidd and Emanuele Castano. What they did was take people and ask them to read quite short passages from various types of books. Some of them were nonfiction books, explanatory or learning books, and some of them where thrillers, plots, where you read about the events happening in a story but not very much about the people; you weren’t inside their heads.
And the third sort was the sort of fiction I am talking about, which is when you were reading things from the perspective of the characters. After that, the researchers got the people to look at a series of photographs of people with very strong facial expressions of one sort or another, and they were asked to judge from the expressions alone what they thought was going on inside those people’s heads.
This is actually quite a standard test for something that we call “Theory of Mind,” which is a rather bad phrase, I think, for a faculty which we’re all, I hope, pretty familiar with; we’ve all got it to some extent or another. And that is the intuitive ability to see from the way a person is moving or expressing themselves what is going on in their head.
The Power of Empathy
It allows us to, just at least for a moment, to step outside our own heads and see the world for a bit from other people’s point of view. And the same faculty, by extension, opens up whole worlds to us because it allows us to imagine what it’s like to be somewhere else, doing something else, seeing it in a different way. And thus people who don’t have it are quite severely handicapped, particularly in social life – they find relationships very difficult. And more than that, they are limited by a very limited imagination. Because without that ability to step outside yourself, it’s difficult to imagine anything, really.
Now, you don’t actually have to look at academic papers to see this effect. We’re all quite familiar with it. I want to tell you about a particular – A few years ago, I went to a reading group which was for people with various types of mental issues. A lot of them had had severe depression or anxiety, and they had come together to start a reading group. And I joined several months in, when it was already having effect.
The particular meeting I went to they were reading “Wuthering Heights,” the English novel, and I just got to this bit where Kathy, the heroine, had to decide between marrying either boring old Linton or this wildly exciting tempestuous chap, Heathcliff. So I just want you to see what they had to say.
“Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff.” “Stop there, Faye. Is this sort of state she’s in something you’d aspire to? Would you like to be feeling what Katherine’s feeling?” “Definitely!” “I want to feel it all the time, and I felt like that, you know, happy nearly all the time, and it can last for weeks, months.”
“It’s a beautiful idea: one moment she’s like ‘I am Heathcliff’, and then you get the sense that it could be very, you know, dangerous as well.” “She’s marrying someone under false pretenses.” “I could imagine it then from Linton’s point of view. Imagine marrying Katherine but then knowing she’s in love with somebody else. And he will, he will find out.” “I think deep down she should be with Heathcliff.” “I think in one way she’s sexually attracted to him, and the passion.” “Yeah.” “Yes.” “And I think she should go for it.”
It did seem to me as I watched and listened to those people that this quite simple act of reading fiction had really changed their lives; and in fact, in one case it actually saved a life.
I know that – as you will probably see in the end, I’ll come to it.
The Neuroscience of Reading
Now, the question that occurred to me was, “What on Earth is happening in people’s brains to have this rather profound effect, this pastime?” So I just want to go a little bit over what is happening in the brain. You probably know that our brains are made up of neurons, electrical cells, and that they join together to form pathways, which have electricity zapping back and forth endlessly, and that electricity ebb and flow is our thoughts, our emotions, and our feelings.
Some of these pathways are pretty similar in all of us because they’re actually built into our genes. Up here, on the left here, they’re the pathways we all have which take light from the eyes to the visual cortex, so the back of our head. On the other side of the frame, you have got the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain so that each side quite literally knows what the other is doing.
Now, I just want to show you quickly the difference between speaking and reading because they are very different. Speaking is something that, again, is in our genes, we already have those pathways wired into us when we are born. All you have to do is put a baby around people who are talking and sooner or later they will start to do it too, it’s natural.
But reading is not. You could put a baby in a library, surrounded by books, from the day it’s born, and it would never start spontaneously reading. It has to be taught how to do it. And this is the reason speech has been with us for at least 100,000 years, quite time for natural selection to actually get it wired into our brains. But reading probably only started about 5,000 years ago, and until about 100 years ago, most people didn’t do it at all.
The Complexity of Reading
So rather than being able to use those pre-wired, intuitive, if you like, pathways, every time, every person who learns to read has to do it afresh. And that means making new pathways, individual pathways, the sort that individuals do make all through their life. Every time they have an experience will lay down a memory or a new habit; they create individual pathways, on top of the basic blueprint. And that’s what we have to do when we read.
Quickly, when you look at a brain that’s speaking, it’s fairly straightforward: if you see a dog, say. Information zooms to the back of the head, visual cortex, then sort of chunks forward. As it chunks forward, it picks up memories of what it’s looking at until by the time it gets to that blue area, which is the first of the major language areas, it is then able to put a word to it. And then it gets jogged on again to that next red area, Broca’s, and that’s when we remember how to say it.
Quite literally, the motor area, which is that green stripe, is then instructed to send instructions to our lips and our tongues to actually make the word. That’s how speaking works. And, as I say, it’s natural, those pathways are there already. But reading is a very different kettle of fish.
The Brain at Work During Reading
When we see abstract symbols written down, our brain has to do far more work. It actually has to, when we are learning to read, we have to create all those new connections in many, many different parts of the brain. You can see the red bits, or the lit-up bits. You can see these aren’t clear, easy, one-trap pathways.
These are really complicated networks that are being formed in the brain when we read. So your brain is doing a lot more work, it’s connecting far more parts. If you like, it’s a more holistic experience. It forces you to use parts of the brain that aren’t usually used.
Reading and Experiencing
More than that, the reason, or one reason why it’s so widespread, is that when we read things about somebody doing something, run for their life or they’re screaming or they’re frightened, what happens in the brain of the reader is that those same bits of the brain that would be active if they were doing it themselves, become active. Admittedly not quite to the same extent, or we’d act out everything we read, and we can usually inhibit them enough not to do that, but basically – These are brain scans of people, you can see from the color chart below, they’re reading.
The actual movement produces the pattern on your left, and when you’re reading it, what is happening in your brain is the pattern on the right. And as you see, they are very similar, with the only difference being that when you’re reading about things, it’s not quite as intense.
The Power of Empathy Through Reading
If it carried on in intensity, you would act it out. Because the important thing about reading is that you’re not just learning what’s going on in that person’s head. You, too, to a certain extent are experiencing it. And there’s a very big difference there.
With pain – if watch or read about somebody in pain, the same bits of the brain that would be active if you were feeling the pain will become active as well. And some people feel this so much that they actually do feel and report the pain. Same with anger, same with any emotion, same even with quite complicated intellectual things, like judgments, moral judgments, and so on.
The Impact of Reading on the Brain
Now, this is the new information which has really only come out this year. Some researchers from Emory University in the States decided to see if they could actually see inside the brain what was going on. We know already from the earlier work that people become at least temporarily more sensitive to other people’s feelings once they’ve read a book or been reading some fiction. And this researchers set out to see if this was something that could actually be seen inside of the brain, physically.
So they had students, lots and lots, I think it was quite a large sample, reading a passage of a particularly engaging and exciting novel with a lot of inside-character driven stuff. It was actually ‘Pompeii’, by Robert Harris, if you want to do the same thing yourself. And they had the people read just 30 pages a night for five nights in a row. And they took brain scans before the people started doing this exercise to get a baseline of what their brains looked like before.
Then they had them read, and every night after they had read a passage, they came in next morning and they had their brain scanned again. And every day there were differences. The differences, this is a sort of schematic picture of where the differences were found, the connections, which as the week went on and they read a passage each night, they got thicker and denser. And they are, as you see, all over the brain, not just in the language areas, everywhere.
Conclusion: The Transformative Power of Reading Fiction
Basically, what these people seemed to be doing was giving themselves a really good workout. In fact, the brain scans looked more or less what you’d expect to find if these people had lived the events that they had been reading about. They had actually lived an experience, and it had become part of the architecture of their brain. So in conclusion, I’m really giving the same message, I think, as Delia, the speaker before, which is that your brain needs a workout as much as your body.
And reading fiction seems to be one of the best workouts you can get. And not only is it good for you, but it’s also good for society as a whole because the brain is like a muscle: the more you force yourself through books to take other people’s perspectives, to sympathize, to empathize with other people, the more empathetic a society we will have. Thank you.
SUMMARY OF THIS TALK:
Rita Carter’s talk, “Why Reading Matters,” illuminates the profound impact of reading, especially fiction, on the human brain and social empathy. She explains that reading is not an innate skill but one that requires the development of new, intricate neural pathways, distinct from those used in natural processes like speaking.
Carter highlights research indicating that engaging with fiction enhances our capacity for empathy by activating the same regions of the brain involved when we experience emotions, actions, or sensations firsthand. This process not only enriches individual cognitive functions and emotional understanding but also fosters a greater capacity for empathy within society.
By delving into characters’ inner lives, readers are able to experience a multitude of perspectives and emotions, broadening their own emotional and social awareness. Moreover, recent studies Carter references, including one from Emory University, show that reading can lead to lasting changes in the brain, suggesting that the act of reading might be akin to living through the experiences themselves.
She posits that fiction reading is a powerful exercise for the brain, enhancing both personal growth and societal empathy. Carter concludes by advocating for the importance of reading fiction, not just for personal health and happiness but also for the cultivation of a more empathetic society.