amanda dangelo

Ask yourself something: When was the last time you got completely lost in a good book? If you’re like most people these days, you probably spend way more time scrolling through TikTok or Instagram than turning the pages of a physical novel. We are constantly gaining information from social media, which naturally means fewer people are sitting down to read.

At first glance, that might not seem like a big deal. We’re still reading captions and tweets, right? But here’s the catch, the quality of our thinking takes a massive decline when we rely on feeds. The algorithms are designed to push simple, bite-sized, and easily digestible content to the top. When we only absorb the simplest ideas, our ability to think deeply, creatively, and critically starts to rapidly degrade. We lose our mental endurance.

But the problem goes deeper than just our attention spans. It actually impacts how we treat each other. Reading fiction, surprisingly, is a workout for your brain.

A fascinating study by researchers P. Matthijs Bal and Martijn Veltkamp looked into how reading fiction influences our ability to empathize. They discovered that when people read a fictional story and become “emotionally transported” into it, meaning they are fully immersed and feel what the characters are feeling, their empathy actually increases over time. The study proved that fiction gives us a unique, safe space to step into someone else’s shoes and experience different emotions without needing to protect ourselves. Interestingly, they didn’t see these same empathy-boosting effects when people read non-fiction, or when they weren’t emotionally engaged in the story.

This highlights a massive problem as a society. If we are trading emotionally transporting fiction for shallow, 15-second videos, we aren’t just losing our focus we are losing our ability to connect with one another on a deeply human level. When we stop practicing empathy through stories, we risk becoming more isolated and less understanding of the people around us in the real world which also effects human connection as a whole.

So, what can we do? Pick up a book. Let yourself be consumed by a fictional world. Your brain, and your compassion will thank you.

What was the last story that truly transported you?

References: 

Bal, P. M., & Veltkamp, M. (2013, January 30). How does fiction reading influence empathy? an experimental investigation on the role of emotional transportation. PloS one. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3559433/