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If I came and told you
there is this one thing you could all do

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which would make you more imaginative,
make your memory better,

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probably improve
your personal relationships,

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and make you a nicer person,

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you would probably be very skeptical.

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And even more so
if I said it costs nothing

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and probably everybody in this room
can already do it.

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Now, you will probably have guessed by now

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that I'm talking about reading -

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there's a clue in the title.

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But I'm not talking
about the sort of reading

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that we all know is incredibly important;

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that is, the sort of reading
we do for education,

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the sort of reading
we do for administration,

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the sort of reading which we have to do
nowadays just to get through life.

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I'm talking rather
about fiction, stories, narratives -

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the sort of reading where you are reading
things from inside another person's head,

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where it takes you right inside

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the character's emotions
and feelings and actions

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so you are seeing it
from their perspective.

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That's the sort of reading
which is at best thought of as pleasurable

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and at worst quite often
as a waste of time.

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I mean, I remember my mother telling me

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that when she was a child
she was crazy about books

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but that her father once ripped
a novel out of her hands,

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saying that 'If you have to read,
at least read something useful.'

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What I want to tell you today

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is that, surprisingly,
fiction is very useful indeed,

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in ways that we probably
never previously suspected;

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in fact, it's more important, probably,
than any other form of reading.

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And I have some new evidence,

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which comes rather surprisingly
out of the brain sciences,

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to support that, which I'll come to.

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First of all, some not-so-new evidence:

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in 2013 there was a series of experiments

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done by two New York psychologists,
David Kidd and Emanuele Castano.

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What they did was take people
and ask them to read

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quite short passages 
from various types of books.

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Some of them were nonfiction books,
explanatory or learning books,

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and some of them where thrillers, plots,

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where you read about the events
happening in a story

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but not very much about the people;
you weren't inside their heads.

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And the third sort

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was the sort of fiction
I am talking about,

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which is when you were reading things
from the perspective of the characters.

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After that, the researchers got the people
to look at a series of photographs

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of people with very strong facial
expressions of one sort or another,

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and they were asked to judge
from the expressions alone

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what they thought was going on
inside those people's heads.

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This is actually quite a standard test

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for something that we call
'Theory of Mind',

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which is a rather bad phrase, I think,

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for a faculty which we're all,
I hope, pretty familiar with;

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we've all got it
to some extent or another.

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And that is the intuitive ability

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to see from the way a person is moving
or expressing themselves

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what is going on in their head.

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It allows us to,
just at least for a moment,

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to step outside our own heads

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and see the world for a bit
from other people's point of view.

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And the same faculty, by extension,

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opens up whole worlds to us

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because it allows us
to imagine what it's like

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to be somewhere else,
doing something else,

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seeing it in a different way.

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And thus people who don't have it
are quite severely handicapped,

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particularly in social life -

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they find relationships very difficult -

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and more than that, they are limited
by a very limited imagination.

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Because without that ability
to step outside yourself,

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it's difficult to imagine
anything, really.

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Now, you don't actually have to look
at academic papers to see this effect.

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We're all quite familiar with it.

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I want to tell you about a particular -

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A few years ago, I went to a reading group

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which was for people
with various types of mental issues.

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A lot of them had had
severe depression or anxiety,

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and they had come together 
to start a reading group.

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And I joined several months in,

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when it was already having effect.

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The particular meeting I went to
they were reading 'Wuthering Heights',

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the English novel,

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and I just got to this bit
where Kathy, the heroine,

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had to decide between marrying
either boring old Linton

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or this wildly exciting
tempestuous chap, Heathcliff.

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So I just want you to see
what they had to say.

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- Every Linton on the face of the earth
might melt into nothing

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before I could consent
to forsake Heathcliff.

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- Stop there, Faye.

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Is this sort of state she's in
something you'd aspire to?

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Would you like to be feeling
what Katherine's feeling?

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- Definitely!

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- I want to feel it all the time,
and I felt like that, you know,

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happy nearly all the time,
and it can last for weeks, months.

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- It's a beautiful idea: one moment
she's like 'I am Heathcliff',

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and then you get the sense

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that it could be very,
you know, dangerous as well.

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- She's marrying someone
under false pretenses.

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- I could imagine it then
from Linton's point of view.

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Imagine marrying Katherine

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but then knowing she's in love
with somebody else.

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And he will, he will find out.

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- I think deep down
she should be with Heathcliff.

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- I think in one way she's sexually
attracted to him, and the passion.

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- Yeah.
- Yes.

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- And I think she should go for it.

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(Laughter)

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It did seem to me as I watched
and listened to those people

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that this quite simple act of reading
fiction had really changed their lives;

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and in fact, in one case
it actually saved a life.

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I know that -

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as you will probably see
in the end, I'll come to it.

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Now, the question that occurred to me was,

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What on Earth is happening
in people's brains

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to have this rather
profound effect, this pastime?

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So I just want to go a little bit
over what is happening in the brain.

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You probably know that our brains
are made up of neurons, electrical cells,

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and that they join together
to form pathways,

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which have electricity zapping
back and forth endlessly,

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and that electricity ebb and flow

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is our thoughts, our emotions,
and our feelings.

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Some of these pathways
are pretty similar in all of us

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because they're actually
built into our genes.

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Up here, on the left here,
they're the pathways we all have

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which take light from the eyes
to the visual cortex,

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so the back of our head.

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On the other side of the frame,

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you have got the connections
between the two hemispheres of the brain

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so that each side quite literally 
knows what the other is doing.

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Now, I just want to show you quickly

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the difference between
speaking and reading

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because they are very different.

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Speaking is something
that, again, is in our genes,

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we already have those pathways
wired into us when we are born.

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All you have to do is put a baby 
around people who are talking

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and sooner or later they will
start to do it too, it's natural.

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But reading is not.

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You could put a baby in a library,
surrounded by books,

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from the day it's born,

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and it would never start
spontaneously reading.

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It has to be taught how to do it.

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And this is the reason
speech has been with us

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for at least 100,000 years,

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quite time for natural selection
to actually get it wired into our brains.

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But reading probably only started
about 5,000 years ago,

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and until about 100 years ago,
most people didn't do it at all.

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So rather than being able
to use those pre-wired,

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intuitive, if you like, pathways,

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every time, every person
who learns to read has to do it afresh.

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And that means making
new pathways, individual pathways,

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the sort that individuals
do make all through their life.

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Every time they have an experience
will lay down a memory or a new habit;

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they create individual pathways,
on top of the basic blueprint.

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And that's what we have
to do when we read.

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Quickly, when you look
at a brain that's speaking,

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it's fairly straight forward:
if you see a dog, say.

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Information zooms to the back
of the head, visual cortex,

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then sort of chunks forward.

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As it chunks forward, it picks up
memories of what it's looking at

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until by the time it gets
to that blue area,

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which is the first
of the major language areas,

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it is then able to put a word to it.

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And then it gets jogged on again
to that next red area, Broca's,

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and that's when we remember how to say it.

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Quite literally, the motor area,
which is that green stripe,

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is then instructed to send instructions
to our lips and our tongues

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to actually make the word.

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That's how speaking works.

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And, as I say, it's natural,
those pathways are there already.

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But reading is
a very different kettle of fish.

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When we see abstract symbols written down,
our brain has to do far more work.

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It actually has to,
when we are learning to read,

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we have to create
all those new connections

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in many, many different
parts of the brain.

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You can see the red bits,
or the lit-up bits.

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You can see these aren't clear,
easy, one-trap pathways.

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These are really complicated networks

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that are being formed
in the brain when we read.

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So your brain is doing a lot more work,
it's connecting far more parts.

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If you like, it's a more
holistic experience.

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It forces you to use parts of the brain
that aren't usually used.

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More than that, the reason,
or one reason why it's so widespread,

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is that when we read things
about somebody doing something,

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run for their life or they're screaming
or they're frightened,

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what happens in the brain of the reader
is that those same bits of the brain

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that would be active
if they were doing it themselves,

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become active.

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Admittedly not quite to the same extent,
or we'd act out everything we read,

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and we can usually inhibit them
enough not to do that,

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but basically -

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These are brain scans of people,

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you can see from the color chart below,

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they're reading.

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The actual movement produces
the pattern on your left,

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and when you're reading it,

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what is happening in your brain
is the pattern on the right.

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And as you see, they are very similar,
with the only difference being

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that when you're reading about things,
it's not quite as intense.

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If it carried on in intensity,
you would act it out.

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Because the important thing about reading

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is that you're not just learning
what's going on in that person's head.

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You, too, to a certain extent
are experiencing it.

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And there's a very big difference there.

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It's the same with everything.

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With pain -

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if watch or read about somebody in pain,

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the same bits of the brain that would
be active if you were feeling the pain

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will become active as well.

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And some people feel this so much

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that they actually
do feel and report the pain.

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Same with anger, same with any emotion,

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same even with quite
complicated intellectual things,

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like judgments,
moral judgments, and so on.

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Now, this is the new information
which has really only come out this year.

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Some researchers from
Emory University in the States

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decided to see if they could actually see
inside the brain what was going on.

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We know already from the earlier work

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that people become at least temporarily
more sensitive to other people's feelings

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once they've read a book
or been reading some fiction.

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And this researchers set out to see

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if this was something
that could actually be seen

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inside of the brain, physically.

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So they had students,

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lots and lots, I think it was
quite a large sample,

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reading a passage of a particularly
engaging and exciting novel

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with a lot of inside-character
driven stuff.

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It was actually 'Pompeii',
by Robert Harris,

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if you want to do
the same thing yourself.

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And they had the people read just 30 pages
a night for five nights in a row.

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And they took brain scans before
the people started doing this exercise

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to get a baseline

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of what their brains looked like before.

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Then they had them read,

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and every night after
they had read a passage,

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they came in next morning
and they had their brain scanned again.

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And every day there were differences.

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The differences,

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00:12:55,564 --> 00:13:01,485
this is a sort of schematic picture
of where the differences where found,

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the connections,

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which as the week went on
and they read a passage each night,

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they got thicker and denser.

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And they are, as you see,
all over the brain,

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not just in the language areas,

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everywhere.

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00:13:14,313 --> 00:13:16,526
Basically, what these people
seemed to be doing

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was giving themselves
a really good workout.

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In fact, the brain scans looked
more or less what you'd expect to find

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if this people had lived the events
that they had been reading about.

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They had actually lived an experience,

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and it had become part
of the architecture of their brain.

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So in conclusion,

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I'm really giving the same message,
I think, as Delia, the speaker before,

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which is that your brain needs
a workout as much as your body.

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And reading fiction seems to be
one of the best workouts you can get.

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And not only is it good for you,
but it's also good for society as a whole

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because the brain is like a muscle:

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the more you force yourself through books
to take other people's perspectives,

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to sympathize, to empathize
with other people,

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the more empathetic
a society we will have.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)