Yes, it’s true. Reading really can affect the way you behave – in a good way

Dear reader. Writers are messing with your mind. And that’s a good thing. There’s always been a view that reading literature – especially great literature – makes you a better person. Now science backs this view. Various studies of brain scans have shown that stories stimulate the brain and can change how we act in real life.

A New York Times report identifies parts of the brain affected by reading. Metaphors can set off real sensations of sight, hearing, touch or taste. The interactions between fictional characters are received as something like real-life social encounters. And entering into the mind of a character – the special privilege of fiction – creates more empathy for others around us.

According to reports, metaphors can set off real sensations of sight, hearing, touch or taste.Credit: Abel Mitja Varela

This research is balm to writers in this age of scrolling and streaming, particularly to those concerned that reading books is a dwindling habit that can bypass the very people most in need of it. See, they say. What did we tell you? Reading matters, and words have power.

But writers don’t always recognise or respect that power, says Melissa Lucashenko. In an essay for Griffith Review, the Miles Franklin winner argues that “writers matter a little bit, but great stories told well matter hugely”. And those stories “should be for other things than our own delightful self-magnification”.

Author Melissa Lucashenko says great stories matter.Credit: Renee Nowytarger

Lucashenko is pleased that stories other than the traditional “Australia for the white man” are being told in a new tide of Aboriginal fiction, including her own. She also celebrates the work of some non-Indigenous writers who “work hard to create stories that tell readers that yes, I can see you, and yes, you matter, and yes, you belong here, because this is your story too”.

But only some of us have easy access to such good fiction, she says. “In an Australia where suicide is fast becoming a national male sport, and where 16 per cent of adults aged 24 to 44 tell researchers that they ‘often feel lonely’, we need a lot more stories of inclusion, big stories that we can all own and relish and find ourselves within.” Meanwhile, there is plenty of not-so-good fiction, and she compares reading it to surviving on a diet of McDonald’s.

Academic Beth Driscoll has also been looking into the power of reading books, and she includes non-fiction in her survey. (You can read more about her discoveries on reading in her book What Readers Do.) In an article for The Conversation, she recounts how she was trying to follow the events in Gaza through social media and was left both shocked and unable to understand what was happening.

Then she discovered a book, Don’t Look Left: A Diary of Genocide by Atef Abu Saif, the Palestinian Authority’s minister for culture, who was visiting Gaza when the bombing started. His diary of the next 85 days, shared with his publisher through WhatsApp messages and memos, became the book.

Driscoll found that reading one man’s perspective, getting to know his extended family and friends, gave her a far better understanding of everyday life under siege. Now she feels, “I have been able to remain engaged when the news feels overwhelming, to place the ongoing horrors of Gaza into a framework of deeper understanding”.

She highlights the aesthetic and moral benefits of reading books; asserts that they can be the source of sensory, even erotic pleasure; can give us training in sustained attention; and that reading can be a form of mindfulness. And perhaps most of all, “reading can be a practice that helps us make sense of the world and our place in it”.

[e-mail]; Jane Sullivan’s latest novel, Murder in Punch Lane, is published by Echo at $32.99.

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