neuroscience

Does Reading Literature Really Beef Up Your Encephalon?

Portrait of John Keats (London, 1795 - Rome, 1821), English poet, Oil on canvas by Joseph Severn (1793-1879), 1821-1823, 56.5 x41.9 cm

Photo: DEA Picture show Library/Getty Images

When you hide your cell telephone, log off your computer, and observe a few rare moments of calm to read some poetry or a weighty novel, information technology certainly feels every bit though information technology ought to exist expert for y'all. But as filling your lungs with fresh air leaves you feeling physically rejuvenated, the words and plot twists of smart literature seem to exercise and cleanse yourmind.

That's how information technology feels, simply psychology researchers have found it difficult to document the concrete benefits of reading. This isn't entirely surprising — for ane affair, this is a complicated subject area to study because people who are more intelligent and emotionally skilled are probably more than likely to want to read fiction and poetry, significant it's difficult to determine whether being smart makes you lot want to read, reading makes you smarter, or some combination of the two. As well, at that place are simply so many unlike types of literature, and so many means to swallow it (binge-reading versus working slowly through a novel, for example), and numerous potential benefits to explore. In short, this isn't a topic that slides neatly under the proverbialmicroscope.

Consider a written report from 2006 that found that people with stronger empathy skills tended to know the names of more novelists, which was presented in some circles as proof that reading fiction makes you more empathic. Just who's to say that people with more empathy don't merely read more? More than recently, a widely reported written report linked reading excerpts of literary fiction (but not the reading of pop fiction or nonfiction) with improvements in certain emotional skills, simply critics pointed out the capricious and limited choice of excerpts (e.k., the likes of Don DeLillo and Lydia Davis excerpts in the smart fiction status versus Danielle Steele and Rosamunde Pilcher in the pop fiction, among others), and highlighted the patchiness of the apparent benefits — reading literary fiction appeared to only take effects on some of the tests that were used, such as reading emotions in faces, merely not others that involved trying to deduce what someone wasthinking.

In the final few years, neuroscientists have joined the mission to attempt to mensurate and discover the physical benefits of reading literature. In 2014, for instance, a encephalon imaging paper attracted international headlines by actualization to prove that reading Pompeii: A Novel by Robert Harris inverse connectivity patterns in specific functional hubs in people's brains. Unfortunately, there were no tests of the participants' mental operation, nor whatever control status. This means, contrary to exciting headlines like  "Encephalon function 'boosted for days subsequently reading a novel,'" that we don't really know whether these connectivity changes improve people'due south mental or emotional skills, nor whether other activities, such as chatting with friends, might have the same or similarfurnishings.

Now the latest attempt in this enquiry genre has been published online at the journal Cortex, with the intriguing championship "'Shall I compare thee': The neural ground of literary awareness, and its benefits to cognition." The researchers, a group of cognitive neuroscientists and literary scholars at the Academy of Liverpool in England led by Noreen O'Sullivan, set out to provide some brain-based testify for why reading is evidently of benefit to "mental health andwell-existence."

The inquiry the scientists cite as evidence these benefits exist in the outset place is non especially robust — for example, one written report they mentioned involved the apparent benefits depressed patients enjoyed from participating in a reading group at a family unit dr.'southward surgery, but at that place was no control condition to compare against, making it incommunicable to confidently attribute whatever benefits to reading (as opposed to, say, hanging out with otherpeople).

Simply for the purpose of their study, the researchers causeless that these benefits exist, and sought to determine why they practice. They believe that reading circuitous literature, including poetry, requires an agility of mind to consider multiple meanings and that this mental ability and then translates to real life, assuasive the reader to respond flexibly and with open-mindedness to their ain trials and tribulations. The researchers further reasoned that this heightened mental agility should exist apparent at the level of brain function. They claim to accept institute this neural evidence, but when you actually dig into the results, they're non as disarming or easy to interpret as they appear at starting timeglance.

To test their theories, the researchers recruited 24 English language literature undergrads (16 women) and asked them to lie in a brain scanner and read and reflect on 48 4-line pieces of prose and poetry, each of which either ended with or without a line requiring a reappraisal ofmeaning.

Here's a snippet of poetry that didn't crave a reappraisal ofmeaning:

What are days for?
Days are where we alive.
They come up, they wake us
Fourth dimension and fourth dimensionover.

Here's some poetry that did crave a reappraisal ofsignificant:

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to exist.
Just she is in her grave, and, oh,
The departure tome.

And here's some prose that didn't requirereappraisal:

Remedies are at that place to be establish
If non in nature, then in bottles.
These can be convincing and life-changing
Only I am tired of looking forcures

And some prose thatdid:

She lived a alone life in the country
Where he tried to notice her
When he saw the brilliant and lively house
He knew she wasdead.

After their scan, the students looked at the items once again and rated each on how poetic they thought it was and whether they felt they'd had to reappraise its meaning. The students who were amend at distinguishing the verse from the prose and at judging when they'd had to reappraise the meaning of an item were considered to have stronger "literary sensation," which the researchers imply comes from time spent reading loftier-brow literature and poetry, rather than from being, say, moreintelligent.

The students' brain activeness was dissimilar when they looked at poetry versus prose, and it varied depending on whether they were reading or reflecting on the writing. For example, reading poetry was correlated with more activity in parts of the frontal cortex and temporal cortex (most the ears), part of the brain associated with language, retentivity, and emotion, amongst other functions, consistent with the idea that poetry is more enervating and requires the reader to maintain several interpretations in their mind at one time. More important for the researchers' theory, the students' encephalon activeness also varied depending on their levels of literaryawareness.

Specifically, while reading and reflecting on prose and poetry, students with more than literary awareness showed different levels of activity in regions making up the so-called central executive network (including frontal brain areas and regions nigh the crown of the head in the parietal lobe) and in the so-called salience network (including regions involved in decision-making basic bodily functions and representing actual states, such as the insula and the encephalon stem). Literary awareness was as well related to the encephalon-activity patterns specifically seen while the students reflected on poesy, including primal nodes in the and then-called default fashion network, which is a collection of brain areas that becomes more than agile when nosotros disengage from the outsideworld.

Taken altogether, these results propose that the students who were more sensitive to the differences between prose and poesy and more aware of shifts in meaning tended to evidence a range of distinct activity patterns in their brains while they were reading, as compared to those with less literary awareness. O'Sullivan and her team members debate these differences are meaningful and that they provide encephalon-based evidence that shows greater literary sensation is associated with the ability to call up more flexibly and to consider multiple meanings at one time. In short, the researchers write, "We draw a parallel between the non-linear procedure a reader goes through in reading a circuitous text, and the mix of uncertainties, choices, blunderings, successes, and insights that nosotros all live through on a dailyfooting."

As a fan of literary fiction (non so much poetry, I take to admit), I like this thought a lot. It'south intuitive and would advise that reading Jonathan Franzen's new novel won't just be fun, but it will also train your brain to improve cope with the uncertainties of real life. And yet, every bit with then much inquiry in this area, the results just don't seem to come close to supporting the grandiose claims being made. In this example, the researchers have made some extraordinarily specific interpretations of the incredibly broad range of brain-action patterns that seemed to be associated with greater literary sensation. It is certainly intriguing that the students with more literary awareness showed different encephalon activity, but the researchers' interpretations of those brain differences are largelyspeculation.

The researchers as well don't know if their measure of literary sensation was really just a proxy for a more mundane trait, such as intelligence. And they know nothing of the students' well-beingness, outlook, or coping skills in real life. Plus, remember that there actually isn't a not bad deal of robust psychological prove for the benefits of reading in the kickoff place — it arguably makes more than sense to exercise that research first before trying to uncover the neural basis for effects that haven't been successfully demonstratedyet.

In short, it would exist so neat if the more literary-aware students approached life with the philosophical perspective of a poet or novelist, just for now, despite the fancy brain-browse findings, that idea remains little more than a expert news story awaiting moreevidence.

Dr. Christian Jarrett  (@Psych_Writer ), a Science of Us contributing writer, is editor of  the British Psychological Gild's Inquiry Digest web log . His latest book is Great Myths of the Encephalon.

Does Literature Really Beef Up Your Brain?