There are so many benefits of reading books they are almost too great to count. Reading can improve your life in many ways. The best part is, reading is fun! Yes, you will stimulate your mind and increase your emotional intelligence. But you can also go on thrilling adventures and experience life changing paradigm shifts. Read on to learn more about analytical skills, empathy, tolerance, and stress reduction.
When books are focused on the psychology of characters and their relationships, readers can learn from those interactions. Regular readers get used to this when reading and the psychological awareness transfers with them to the real world Fiction Improves Empathy. This means, the more you read, the better you will understand the people around you.
And now to even more benefits of reading fiction. Fiction often deals with topics like prejudice. This study cited Harry Potter specifically, which makes it that much cooler. Reading is a great way to relax and unwind at the end of the day. When reading, you become so engrossed in the story that you are able to momentarily forget the pressures of your life. Reading for even just six minutes can lower heart rate and ease the tension in muscles. Reading Can Reduce Stress.
I have an entire post all about how to improve analytical skills by reading fiction. The brain is always trying to organize and sort information. When you talk about a book with someone, it helps solidify that process even more! Yes, talking about books can improve your analytical skills. When you search for plot holes or consider alternate endings, you are teaching your brain to sort and organize.
Analyzing a book with another person can also improve your communication skills. Who else loves to dissect characters and a plot with anyone who will listen? I have my hand raised way, way up. Even if you read from a kindle instead of a print book, the benefits are still there. Reading science fiction has many benefits beyond pure entertainment.
To follow a plot, we need to know who knows what, how they feel about it and what each character believes others might be thinking. To get around this, Oatley and colleagues gave students a list of fiction and non-fiction writers and asked them to indicate which writers they had heard of.
The number of writers people have heard of turns out to be a good proxy for how much they actually read. From the eyes and surrounding skin alone, your task is to divine which emotion a person is feeling. You are given a short list of options like shy, guilty, daydreaming or worried. But those deemed to have read more fiction than non-fiction scored higher on this test — as well as on a scale measuring interpersonal sensitivity. At the Princeton Social Neuroscience Lab, psychologist Diana Tamir has demonstrated that people who often read fiction have better social cognition.
Using brain scans, she has found that while reading fiction, there is more activity in parts of the default mode network of the brain that are involved in simulating what other people are thinking. People who often read fiction have greater social cognition Credit: Getty Images. Before the pen-drop took place participants were given a mood questionnaire interspersed with questions measuring empathy.
Then they read a short story and answered a series of questions about to the extent they had felt transported while reading the story. Did they have a vivid mental picture of the characters? Building an Author Website. Instagram Facebook Twitter Pinterest. Why Do We Read Fiction? Here Are 5 Reasons by Monica M.
Honesty and vulnerability are key to connecting with your readers when they need a companion. Are you holding back? Monica M. Monica is a lawyer trying to knock out her first novel. She lives in D. You can follow her on her blog or on Twitter monicamclark. Say Yes to Practice.
I'M IN! The Practicing Community. By using fiction to explore ideas of change, complex emotions and the unknown. Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, proposed to the New York Times that reading produces a kind of reality simulation that "runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.
Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, "is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the complexities of social life.
Writer Eileen Gunn suggests that reading science fiction, in particular , helps us accept change more readily:. Change is all around us. Probably things change faster now than they did four or five hundred years ago, particularly in some parts of the world. We know that hearing a story is a great way to remember information for the long-term.
Now there's also evidence that readers experience slower memory declined later in life compared to non-readers. In particular, later-in-life readers have a 32 percent lower rate of mental decline compared to their peers. In addition to slower memory decline, those who read more have been found to show less characteristics of Alzheimer's disease, according to a study published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Can reading Harry Potter make us more inclusive, tolerant and open-minded?
One study says yes. A butterbeer toast for everyone! The study, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, tested whether the novels of Harry Potter could be used as a tool for improving attitudes toward stigmatized groups.
After 3 experiments in which students read passages of the books about discrimination, the students showed changed attitudes about everything from immigrants to gay students. Mic reports that "the researchers credited the books with improving readers' ability to assume the perspective of marginalized groups.
They also claimed that young children, with the help of a teacher, were able to understand that Harry's frequent support of "mudbloods" was an allegory towards bigotry in real-life society. There's no doubt that books can open your mind. We all want the kind of vocabulary that can help us express ourselves and connect with others.
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