How Reading Makes Us More Human

The Atlantic:

A battle over books has erupted recently on the pages of The New York Times and Time. The opening salvo was Gregory Currie’s essay, “Does Great Literature Make Us Better?” which asserts that the widely held belief that reading makes us more moral has little support. In response, Annie Murphy Paul weighed in with “Reading Literature Makes Us Smarter and Nicer.” Her argument is that “deep reading,” the kind of reading great literature requires, is a distinctive cognitive activity that contributes to our ability to empathize with others; it therefore can, in fact, makes us “smarter and nicer,” among other things. Yet these essays aren’t so much coming to different conclusions as considering different questions.

To advance her thesis, Paul cites studies by Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, and Keith Oatley, a professor emeritus of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto. Taken together, their findings suggest that those “who often read fiction appear to be better able to understand other people, empathize with them and view the world from their perspective.” It’s the kind of thing writer Joyce Carol Oates is talking about when she says, “Reading is the sole means by which we slip, involuntarily, often helplessly, into another’s skin, another’s voice, another’s soul.”

Read the whole story: The Atlantic