WEBVTT 00:00:18.556 --> 00:00:22.518 If I came and told you there is this one thing you could all do 00:00:22.799 --> 00:00:27.148 which would make you more imaginative, make your memory better, 00:00:27.358 --> 00:00:29.876 probably improve your personal relationships, 00:00:30.169 --> 00:00:32.362 and make you a nicer person, 00:00:32.436 --> 00:00:34.200 you would probably be very skeptical. 00:00:34.202 --> 00:00:36.856 And even more so if I said it costs nothing 00:00:36.856 --> 00:00:40.250 and probably everybody in this room can already do it. 00:00:40.642 --> 00:00:43.379 Now, you will probably have guessed by now 00:00:43.707 --> 00:00:45.657 that I'm talking about reading - 00:00:45.957 --> 00:00:47.856 there's a clue in the title. 00:00:48.697 --> 00:00:51.057 But I'm not talking about the sort of reading 00:00:51.057 --> 00:00:53.468 that we all know is incredibly important; 00:00:53.468 --> 00:00:56.016 that is, the sort of reading we do for education, 00:00:56.016 --> 00:00:58.136 the sort of reading we do for administration, 00:00:58.136 --> 00:01:01.619 the sort of reading which we have to do nowadays just to get through life. 00:01:01.619 --> 00:01:05.967 I'm talking rather about fiction, stories, narratives - 00:01:06.346 --> 00:01:11.377 the sort of reading where you are reading things from inside another person's head, 00:01:11.377 --> 00:01:12.859 where it takes you right inside 00:01:12.859 --> 00:01:15.661 the character's emotions and feelings and actions 00:01:15.661 --> 00:01:17.868 so you are seeing it from their perspective. 00:01:19.249 --> 00:01:24.388 That's the sort of reading which is at best thought of as pleasurable 00:01:24.388 --> 00:01:26.444 and at worst quite often as a waste of time. 00:01:26.444 --> 00:01:29.096 I mean, I remember my mother telling me 00:01:29.096 --> 00:01:31.486 that when she was a child she was crazy about books 00:01:31.486 --> 00:01:35.435 but that her father once ripped a novel out of her hands, 00:01:35.435 --> 00:01:39.439 saying that 'If you have to read, at least read something useful.' 00:01:40.807 --> 00:01:42.378 What I want to tell you today 00:01:42.378 --> 00:01:47.138 is that, surprisingly, fiction is very useful indeed, 00:01:47.138 --> 00:01:50.027 in ways that we probably never previously suspected; 00:01:50.287 --> 00:01:54.469 in fact, it's more important, probably, than any other form of reading. 00:01:54.658 --> 00:01:56.428 And I have some new evidence, 00:01:56.428 --> 00:01:59.378 which comes rather surprisingly out of the brain sciences, 00:01:59.938 --> 00:02:02.058 to support that, which I'll come to. 00:02:02.528 --> 00:02:05.868 First of all, some not-so-new evidence: 00:02:05.868 --> 00:02:09.448 in 2013 there was a series of experiments 00:02:10.208 --> 00:02:16.146 done by two New York psychologists, David Kidd and Emanuele Castano. 00:02:16.903 --> 00:02:20.526 What they did was take people and ask them to read 00:02:20.526 --> 00:02:23.860 quite short passages from various types of books. 00:02:24.558 --> 00:02:28.483 Some of them were nonfiction books, explanatory or learning books, 00:02:28.874 --> 00:02:31.417 and some of them where thrillers, plots, 00:02:31.417 --> 00:02:34.278 where you read about the events happening in a story 00:02:34.278 --> 00:02:37.807 but not very much about the people; you weren't inside their heads. 00:02:38.198 --> 00:02:39.652 And the third sort 00:02:39.652 --> 00:02:41.696 was the sort of fiction I am talking about, 00:02:41.696 --> 00:02:45.322 which is when you were reading things from the perspective of the characters. 00:02:46.377 --> 00:02:52.158 After that, the researchers got the people to look at a series of photographs 00:02:52.978 --> 00:02:57.950 of people with very strong facial expressions of one sort or another, 00:02:57.950 --> 00:03:01.618 and they were asked to judge from the expressions alone 00:03:01.618 --> 00:03:05.670 what they thought was going on inside those people's heads. 00:03:06.968 --> 00:03:09.629 This is actually quite a standard test 00:03:09.629 --> 00:03:12.449 for something that we call 'Theory of Mind', 00:03:12.449 --> 00:03:15.868 which is a rather bad phrase, I think, 00:03:15.868 --> 00:03:19.219 for a faculty which we're all, I hope, pretty familiar with; 00:03:19.219 --> 00:03:21.670 we've all got it to some extent or another. 00:03:21.670 --> 00:03:25.214 And that is the intuitive ability 00:03:25.744 --> 00:03:29.978 to see from the way a person is moving or expressing themselves 00:03:30.608 --> 00:03:33.151 what is going on in their head. 00:03:34.191 --> 00:03:37.663 It allows us to, just at least for a moment, 00:03:37.663 --> 00:03:40.155 to step outside our own heads 00:03:40.475 --> 00:03:44.247 and see the world for a bit from other people's point of view. 00:03:45.170 --> 00:03:48.354 And the same faculty, by extension, 00:03:48.714 --> 00:03:51.318 opens up whole worlds to us 00:03:51.318 --> 00:03:54.568 because it allows us to imagine what it's like 00:03:54.568 --> 00:03:56.797 to be somewhere else, doing something else, 00:03:56.797 --> 00:03:58.869 seeing it in a different way. 00:03:59.507 --> 00:04:04.437 And thus people who don't have it are quite severely handicapped, 00:04:04.588 --> 00:04:06.149 particularly in social life - 00:04:06.149 --> 00:04:08.537 they find relationships very difficult - 00:04:08.537 --> 00:04:12.789 and more than that, they are limited by a very limited imagination. 00:04:12.789 --> 00:04:16.149 Because without that ability to step outside yourself, 00:04:16.149 --> 00:04:19.618 it's difficult to imagine anything, really. 00:04:20.058 --> 00:04:24.308 Now, you don't actually have to look at academic papers to see this effect. 00:04:24.308 --> 00:04:25.898 We're all quite familiar with it. 00:04:25.898 --> 00:04:27.898 I want to tell you about a particular - 00:04:27.898 --> 00:04:30.788 A few years ago, I went to a reading group 00:04:31.080 --> 00:04:35.207 which was for people with various types of mental issues. 00:04:35.207 --> 00:04:38.409 A lot of them had had severe depression or anxiety, 00:04:38.409 --> 00:04:40.887 and they had come together to start a reading group. 00:04:40.887 --> 00:04:42.548 And I joined several months in, 00:04:42.548 --> 00:04:44.457 when it was already having effect. 00:04:44.927 --> 00:04:49.578 The particular meeting I went to they were reading 'Wuthering Heights', 00:04:49.578 --> 00:04:50.898 the English novel, 00:04:50.898 --> 00:04:53.869 and I just got to this bit where Kathy, the heroine, 00:04:53.869 --> 00:04:56.738 had to decide between marrying either boring old Linton 00:04:56.738 --> 00:05:01.069 or this wildly exciting tempestuous chap, Heathcliff. 00:05:01.165 --> 00:05:03.737 So I just want you to see what they had to say. 00:05:04.147 --> 00:05:07.948 - Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing 00:05:08.258 --> 00:05:10.737 before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff. 00:05:11.409 --> 00:05:14.383 - Stop there, Faye. 00:05:14.753 --> 00:05:19.327 Is this sort of state she's in something you'd aspire to? 00:05:19.328 --> 00:05:22.908 Would you like to be feeling what Katherine's feeling? 00:05:23.561 --> 00:05:24.619 - Definitely! 00:05:24.619 --> 00:05:27.678 - I want to feel it all the time, and I felt like that, you know, 00:05:27.678 --> 00:05:30.529 happy nearly all the time, and it can last for weeks, months. 00:05:30.529 --> 00:05:33.572 - It's a beautiful idea: one moment she's like 'I am Heathcliff', 00:05:33.572 --> 00:05:34.826 and then you get the sense 00:05:34.826 --> 00:05:37.288 that it could be very, you know, dangerous as well. 00:05:37.358 --> 00:05:40.718 - She's marrying someone under false pretenses. 00:05:41.638 --> 00:05:44.497 - I could imagine it then from Linton's point of view. 00:05:44.497 --> 00:05:45.969 Imagine marrying Katherine 00:05:45.969 --> 00:05:48.426 but then knowing she's in love with somebody else. 00:05:48.727 --> 00:05:51.864 And he will, he will find out. 00:05:51.864 --> 00:05:54.399 - I think deep down she should be with Heathcliff. 00:05:54.399 --> 00:05:58.631 - I think in one way she's sexually attracted to him, and the passion. 00:05:58.631 --> 00:05:59.651 - Yeah. - Yes. 00:05:59.651 --> 00:06:01.410 - And I think she should go for it. 00:06:01.410 --> 00:06:02.568 (Laughter) 00:06:03.949 --> 00:06:06.938 It did seem to me as I watched and listened to those people 00:06:06.938 --> 00:06:10.980 that this quite simple act of reading fiction had really changed their lives; 00:06:10.980 --> 00:06:13.625 and in fact, in one case it actually saved a life. 00:06:13.625 --> 00:06:15.330 I know that - 00:06:16.358 --> 00:06:19.318 as you will probably see in the end, I'll come to it. 00:06:19.318 --> 00:06:21.850 Now, the question that occurred to me was, 00:06:21.850 --> 00:06:24.050 What on Earth is happening in people's brains 00:06:24.050 --> 00:06:27.358 to have this rather profound effect, this pastime? 00:06:27.888 --> 00:06:31.340 So I just want to go a little bit over what is happening in the brain. 00:06:31.600 --> 00:06:35.130 You probably know that our brains are made up of neurons, electrical cells, 00:06:35.130 --> 00:06:38.208 and that they join together to form pathways, 00:06:38.208 --> 00:06:41.368 which have electricity zapping back and forth endlessly, 00:06:41.368 --> 00:06:43.445 and that electricity ebb and flow 00:06:43.445 --> 00:06:47.448 is our thoughts, our emotions, and our feelings. 00:06:47.948 --> 00:06:50.580 Some of these pathways are pretty similar in all of us 00:06:50.580 --> 00:06:53.339 because they're actually built into our genes. 00:06:53.339 --> 00:06:56.969 Up here, on the left here, they're the pathways we all have 00:06:56.969 --> 00:06:59.928 which take light from the eyes to the visual cortex, 00:06:59.928 --> 00:07:01.137 so the back of our head. 00:07:01.137 --> 00:07:02.616 On the other side of the frame, 00:07:02.616 --> 00:07:05.909 you have got the connections between the two hemispheres of the brain 00:07:05.909 --> 00:07:09.028 so that each side quite literally knows what the other is doing. 00:07:09.028 --> 00:07:11.448 Now, I just want to show you quickly 00:07:11.448 --> 00:07:15.553 the difference between speaking and reading 00:07:15.553 --> 00:07:17.178 because they are very different. 00:07:17.368 --> 00:07:21.090 Speaking is something that, again, is in our genes, 00:07:21.090 --> 00:07:24.509 we already have those pathways wired into us when we are born. 00:07:24.509 --> 00:07:28.888 All you have to do is put a baby around people who are talking 00:07:28.888 --> 00:07:31.859 and sooner or later they will start to do it too, it's natural. 00:07:31.859 --> 00:07:34.185 But reading is not. 00:07:34.444 --> 00:07:37.421 You could put a baby in a library, surrounded by books, 00:07:37.421 --> 00:07:38.938 from the day it's born, 00:07:38.938 --> 00:07:41.874 and it would never start spontaneously reading. 00:07:41.874 --> 00:07:44.379 It has to be taught how to do it. 00:07:44.379 --> 00:07:46.877 And this is the reason speech has been with us 00:07:46.877 --> 00:07:49.179 for at least 100,000 years, 00:07:49.179 --> 00:07:53.879 quite time for natural selection to actually get it wired into our brains. 00:07:54.172 --> 00:07:57.750 But reading probably only started about 5,000 years ago, 00:07:57.750 --> 00:08:01.528 and until about 100 years ago, most people didn't do it at all. 00:08:02.908 --> 00:08:06.113 So rather than being able to use those pre-wired, 00:08:06.113 --> 00:08:08.999 intuitive, if you like, pathways, 00:08:08.999 --> 00:08:13.609 every time, every person who learns to read has to do it afresh. 00:08:13.609 --> 00:08:17.186 And that means making new pathways, individual pathways, 00:08:17.186 --> 00:08:19.998 the sort that individuals do make all through their life. 00:08:19.998 --> 00:08:23.548 Every time they have an experience will lay down a memory or a new habit; 00:08:23.548 --> 00:08:28.822 they create individual pathways, on top of the basic blueprint. 00:08:29.052 --> 00:08:31.607 And that's what we have to do when we read. 00:08:32.057 --> 00:08:34.389 Quickly, when you look at a brain that's speaking, 00:08:34.389 --> 00:08:37.889 it's fairly straight forward: if you see a dog, say. 00:08:37.889 --> 00:08:40.589 Information zooms to the back of the head, visual cortex, 00:08:40.589 --> 00:08:41.968 then sort of chunks forward. 00:08:41.968 --> 00:08:45.119 As it chunks forward, it picks up memories of what it's looking at 00:08:45.119 --> 00:08:47.890 until by the time it gets to that blue area, 00:08:47.890 --> 00:08:50.379 which is the first of the major language areas, 00:08:50.659 --> 00:08:54.098 it is then able to put a word to it. 00:08:54.098 --> 00:08:57.748 And then it gets jogged on again to that next red area, Broca's, 00:08:57.748 --> 00:09:00.469 and that's when we remember how to say it. 00:09:00.469 --> 00:09:03.577 Quite literally, the motor area, which is that green stripe, 00:09:03.577 --> 00:09:06.718 is then instructed to send instructions to our lips and our tongues 00:09:06.718 --> 00:09:08.398 to actually make the word. 00:09:08.398 --> 00:09:10.348 That's how speaking works. 00:09:10.348 --> 00:09:13.539 And, as I say, it's natural, those pathways are there already. 00:09:13.899 --> 00:09:17.247 But reading is a very different kettle of fish. 00:09:17.247 --> 00:09:22.419 When we see abstract symbols written down, our brain has to do far more work. 00:09:22.419 --> 00:09:25.108 It actually has to, when we are learning to read, 00:09:25.108 --> 00:09:27.689 we have to create all those new connections 00:09:27.689 --> 00:09:29.817 in many, many different parts of the brain. 00:09:29.817 --> 00:09:32.218 You can see the red bits, or the lit-up bits. 00:09:32.218 --> 00:09:36.138 You can see these aren't clear, easy, one-trap pathways. 00:09:36.138 --> 00:09:38.920 These are really complicated networks 00:09:38.920 --> 00:09:41.680 that are being formed in the brain when we read. 00:09:41.680 --> 00:09:45.569 So your brain is doing a lot more work, it's connecting far more parts. 00:09:45.569 --> 00:09:48.340 If you like, it's a more holistic experience. 00:09:48.340 --> 00:09:53.259 It forces you to use parts of the brain that aren't usually used. 00:09:54.039 --> 00:09:57.780 More than that, the reason, or one reason why it's so widespread, 00:09:57.780 --> 00:10:01.739 is that when we read things about somebody doing something, 00:10:01.739 --> 00:10:05.750 run for their life or they're screaming or they're frightened, 00:10:06.250 --> 00:10:12.149 what happens in the brain of the reader is that those same bits of the brain 00:10:12.479 --> 00:10:15.694 that would be active if they were doing it themselves, 00:10:15.694 --> 00:10:16.890 become active. 00:10:16.890 --> 00:10:21.229 Admittedly not quite to the same extent, or we'd act out everything we read, 00:10:21.229 --> 00:10:24.146 and we can usually inhibit them enough not to do that, 00:10:24.146 --> 00:10:25.223 but basically - 00:10:25.223 --> 00:10:27.853 These are brain scans of people, 00:10:27.853 --> 00:10:30.195 you can see from the color chart below, 00:10:30.195 --> 00:10:31.198 they're reading. 00:10:31.198 --> 00:10:35.618 The actual movement produces the pattern on your left, 00:10:35.618 --> 00:10:37.773 and when you're reading it, 00:10:37.773 --> 00:10:40.939 what is happening in your brain is the pattern on the right. 00:10:40.939 --> 00:10:44.357 And as you see, they are very similar, with the only difference being 00:10:44.357 --> 00:10:47.559 that when you're reading about things, it's not quite as intense. 00:10:47.559 --> 00:10:50.550 If it carried on in intensity, you would act it out. 00:10:50.930 --> 00:10:52.880 Because the important thing about reading 00:10:52.880 --> 00:10:57.019 is that you're not just learning what's going on in that person's head. 00:10:57.019 --> 00:11:00.930 You, too, to a certain extent are experiencing it. 00:11:01.230 --> 00:11:03.299 And there's a very big difference there. 00:11:03.539 --> 00:11:05.028 It's the same with everything. 00:11:05.028 --> 00:11:06.308 With pain - 00:11:06.528 --> 00:11:09.808 if watch or read about somebody in pain, 00:11:10.958 --> 00:11:14.566 the same bits of the brain that would be active if you were feeling the pain 00:11:14.566 --> 00:11:16.788 will become active as well. 00:11:16.788 --> 00:11:21.053 And some people feel this so much 00:11:21.487 --> 00:11:25.179 that they actually do feel and report the pain. 00:11:26.299 --> 00:11:28.205 Same with anger, same with any emotion, 00:11:28.205 --> 00:11:30.881 same even with quite complicated intellectual things, 00:11:30.881 --> 00:11:34.799 like judgments, moral judgments, and so on. 00:11:35.224 --> 00:11:38.708 Now, this is the new information which has really only come out this year. 00:11:38.708 --> 00:11:42.866 Some researchers from Emory University in the States 00:11:42.866 --> 00:11:47.522 decided to see if they could actually see inside the brain what was going on. 00:11:47.522 --> 00:11:49.633 We know already from the earlier work 00:11:49.633 --> 00:11:54.204 that people become at least temporarily more sensitive to other people's feelings 00:11:54.204 --> 00:11:57.430 once they've read a book or been reading some fiction. 00:11:57.644 --> 00:11:59.721 And this researchers set out to see 00:11:59.721 --> 00:12:02.552 if this was something that could actually be seen 00:12:02.552 --> 00:12:04.795 inside of the brain, physically. 00:12:04.795 --> 00:12:08.147 So they had students, 00:12:08.678 --> 00:12:11.211 lots and lots, I think it was quite a large sample, 00:12:12.431 --> 00:12:18.844 reading a passage of a particularly engaging and exciting novel 00:12:18.844 --> 00:12:23.832 with a lot of inside-character driven stuff. 00:12:23.832 --> 00:12:26.102 It was actually 'Pompeii', by Robert Harris, 00:12:26.102 --> 00:12:29.694 if you want to do the same thing yourself. 00:12:29.694 --> 00:12:33.853 And they had the people read just 30 pages a night for five nights in a row. 00:12:33.853 --> 00:12:37.222 And they took brain scans before the people started doing this exercise 00:12:37.222 --> 00:12:39.173 to get a baseline 00:12:39.567 --> 00:12:41.824 of what their brains looked like before. 00:12:41.824 --> 00:12:43.025 Then they had them read, 00:12:43.025 --> 00:12:45.394 and every night after they had read a passage, 00:12:45.394 --> 00:12:48.913 they came in next morning and they had their brain scanned again. 00:12:49.956 --> 00:12:54.414 And every day there were differences. 00:12:54.664 --> 00:12:55.564 The differences, 00:12:55.564 --> 00:13:01.485 this is a sort of schematic picture of where the differences where found, 00:13:01.485 --> 00:13:02.560 the connections, 00:13:02.560 --> 00:13:06.953 which as the week went on and they read a passage each night, 00:13:06.953 --> 00:13:08.764 they got thicker and denser. 00:13:08.764 --> 00:13:11.584 And they are, as you see, all over the brain, 00:13:11.584 --> 00:13:13.278 not just in the language areas, 00:13:13.278 --> 00:13:14.313 everywhere. 00:13:14.313 --> 00:13:16.526 Basically, what these people seemed to be doing 00:13:16.526 --> 00:13:18.716 was giving themselves a really good workout. 00:13:18.716 --> 00:13:23.591 In fact, the brain scans looked more or less what you'd expect to find 00:13:23.591 --> 00:13:27.854 if this people had lived the events that they had been reading about. 00:13:28.033 --> 00:13:30.603 They had actually lived an experience, 00:13:30.603 --> 00:13:34.525 and it had become part of the architecture of their brain. 00:13:34.888 --> 00:13:36.069 So in conclusion, 00:13:36.069 --> 00:13:40.565 I'm really giving the same message, I think, as Delia, the speaker before, 00:13:40.565 --> 00:13:45.136 which is that your brain needs a workout as much as your body. 00:13:45.480 --> 00:13:50.916 And reading fiction seems to be one of the best workouts you can get. 00:13:51.896 --> 00:13:57.526 And not only is it good for you, but it's also good for society as a whole 00:13:57.526 --> 00:13:59.984 because the brain is like a muscle: 00:13:59.984 --> 00:14:04.658 the more you force yourself through books to take other people's perspectives, 00:14:05.023 --> 00:14:08.575 to sympathize, to empathize with other people, 00:14:08.575 --> 00:14:11.715 the more empathetic a society we will have. 00:14:11.715 --> 00:14:12.746 Thank you. 00:14:12.746 --> 00:14:14.045 (Applause)