So I like to think that I read a lot of books but actually the majority of what I read is fiction rather than kind of useful productivity books. So I always have a fantasy series going inaudible these days.
The Wheel of Time series and I've always got some sort of paranormal romance type of genre book on Kindle that I read before bed these days are quarter the 1 in roses but as a self-professed productivity grease monkey I've often wondered is reading fiction a waste of time or is it actually good for you like I feel bad about watching TV or playing video games because it feels like a waste of time.
But I would easily stay up until 4 o'clock in the morning reading about some werewolf and how he's fallen in love with this like girl with psychic powers, Stranger things happen every day like clearly that's not productive either.
But for some reason reading feels more legit than watching TV. So in this episode of journal club the series where we look at scientific papers to find some important insights we're analyzing whether reading fiction is good for you and we're therefore whether I'm allowed to continue reading the sort of trash or if I should donate my multiple signed copies of Twilight to a children's library.
American author and Hatchett famously said:
"reading fiction gives us the ability to feel empathy for people we've never met living lives"
We couldn't possibly experience for ourselves because the book puts us inside the characters skin now.
The good news is that apparently reading fiction helps with social cognition and empathy.
Compared to nonfiction reading or no reading fiction reading leads to a small statistically significant improvement in social cognitive performance, which is exactly what I need in my life.
There's even some evidence that reading fiction helps reduce our prejudice and bias which is particularly important in these sorts of times.
Reading narrative fiction appears to ameliorate and biased categorical and emotional perception of mixed-race individuals and in fact my own first real understanding of racism as a thing came from reading Malorie Blackman's incredible some crosses series.
So we've established that I should continue reading fiction to help to boost my empathy but there's even some evidence that reading fiction helps boost our cognitive like brain power performance from a very young age.
VOCABULARY BENEFITS
This study for example conducted by the website to test your vocab calm found that reading build a vocabulary which is pretty obvious but they also discovered that those who read fiction in particular had a much more varied and deeper vocabulary rather than those who read non-fiction books.
So reading fiction expands our vernacular more than reading nonfiction does, but we've also got some studies that show using functional MRI scanning that different parts of our brain light up when we're reading different sorts of fiction.
LIGHTS UP
We've got this study from 2013 for example that shows that when we read fiction we get the lighting up of our left temporal cortex which is the bit of the brain that deals with language that's not usually surprising.
But this study from Spain showed that if you read words like lavender of human coffee that like reading those words lights up with these smell regions of the brain, which is kind of cool and we've got this story from France that shows that if you read about different motor activities it lights up different parts of the motor cortex so a leaf through the cat would light up a different part of the brain.
There two kind of different actions and that's kind of cool as well so does that show that reading fiction is good for us well no not directly but it does show that when we read we are also lighting up different parts of our brain rather than just the bits of the brain that processed language.
GOOD FOR HEALTH AS WELL
Okay so we've established that reading fiction is good for empathy and it's good for language development but did you know reading fiction is also good for health.
BEST FOR MENTAL HEALTH
In general this study from the University of Sussex in the UK for example showed that reading fiction is better for reducing stress levels than going for a walk listening to music or playing video games they said - that reading for as little as six minutes is sufficient to reduce stress levels by 60% , slowing heartbeat , easing muscle tension and altering the state of mind.
LETS YOU SLEEP WELL
Whatever that means and in the same study they also showed that reading before bed helps improve the quality of sleep.
So you know that's another plus point for reading so that was in a short-term but there is some evidence that reading over the long-term helps reduce our cognitive decline as we age and might potentially even slow down the development of disorders like dementia and Alzheimer's disease.
MISCELLANEOUS
This study from 2011 for example says that being engaged in more reading and hobby activities and spending more time each week reading is associated with a lower subsequent risk of incident dementia.
We've even got an NHS page that answers the question of whether lifelong reading could protect against dementia it says on the page that although these studies cannot provide conclusive proof that greater cognitive activity directly prevents development of mild cognitive impairments or diagnosis of dementia it does accept that regular reading could.
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