Why reading matters | Rita Carter | TEDxCluj

Summary

这段视频讲述了阅读小说如何提高我们的想象力、记忆力和同理心。讲者举了读书小组成员讨论《呼啸山庄》的例子,说明小说能让读者暂时体验他人的情感,提高对他人的理解。她又提到新的脑科学研究发现,阅读小说确实能激活我们大脑的多处区域,增强联结,提高我们对他人的同理心。所以她建议大家多读小说,这不仅对个人有益,也有助于培养一个更有同情心的社会。

Takeaways

• 😊 阅读小说可以增强我们的同理心和移情作用
• 🤔 小说阅读可以改善我们的记忆力、想象力和社交能力
• 😆 阅读小说可以让大脑得到很好的锻炼
• 🧐 小说阅读产生的大脑活动模式与真实经历相似
• 🤯 学习阅读需要建立新的神经通路,这需要比语言本身更大的努力
• 😮 父母和老师应该鼓励孩子阅读小说,这对他们的成长很有帮助
• 😀 有研究表明,阅读小说5天可以明显改变大脑连接
• 😃 阅读小说群可以帮助人们应对焦虑和抑郁
• 🙂 相比其他类型的阅读,小说阅读对大脑各部分的激活更为全面
• ☺️ 父母和老师不应轻视或禁止孩子阅读小说

Q & A

阅读小说究竟对大脑有什么好处?

能提高想象力,增强记忆力,改善人际关系,培养同理心。

为什么说阅读小说比其他类型的阅读更重要?

它能让人站在他人的角度思考问题,理解他人的感受和经历。

大脑中负责语言的区域有哪些差别?

语言区域主要分为韦氏区、布若卡区和运动皮层,语言产生需要这三个区域协同工作。

阅读和语言表达在大脑中有何不同?

语言表达利用先天路径,而阅读需要学习建立新的神经连接。

为什么说阅读比语言表达对大脑更具挑战性?

阅读时大脑各区域之间形成更为复杂的神经网络,需要更多脑区协同工作。

阅读小说时,为什么读者会体验到角色的情绪?

和角色相似的大脑区域会被激活,让读者在一定程度上也“体验”了情绪。

埃默里大学的研究发现了什么?

连续阅读小说可以增强读者对他人情感的敏感度,在大脑中也可以看到相关的物理变化。

研究中参与者大脑发生了哪些变化?

神经连接变得更加密集,就像亲身经历了描述的事件一样。

为什么说阅读小说对大脑有益?

它能让大脑获得很好的锻炼,也能增强社会的同理心。

演讲者希望传达什么关键信息?

你的大脑和身体一样需要锻炼,阅读小说能提供非常好的智力锻炼。

Outlines

00:00

🙂 Paragraph 1 Title

Detailed summary of paragraph 1 content

05:01

😊 Paragraph 2 Title

Detailed summary of paragraph 2 content

Keywords

💡读小说

在视频中,“读小说”指的是读虚构和叙事类文学作品。这类阅读把读者带入角色的内心世界,让他们从角色的视角看问题。视频中提到,这类阅读不仅让人获得乐趣,也能增强想象力,提高记忆力,改善人际关系,成为更好的人。

💡推理他人心理状态的能力

这指的是根据他人的表情和动作推断他们内心的想法和感受的能力。视频中通过一个实验展示了读小说能增强这种能力。

💡共情

共情指设身处地为他人着想,理解他人的感受。视频中提到,读小说能培养我们的共情能力,从而创造一个更有同情心的社会。

💡大脑路径

大脑由神经元组成,神经元之间有电流传递信息。这些连接被称为“路径”。视频中解释了说话和读写涉及不同的大脑路径。读写需要建立新的路径。

💡身临其境

当读者阅读一个人执行某个动作或经历某种情感的描写时,读者大脑中与实际执行这个动作或感受这种情感相关的部分也会激活,产生“身临其境”的感觉。

💡思维中枢

视频中称,小说阅读似乎给大脑提供了很好的锻炼,连接并激活了大脑的多个区域,就像人们真正生活了所读的体验一样,这加强了大脑的功能。

💡情感投射

当我们读到一个人在经历痛苦或其他情感时,我们大脑中与感受这些情感相关的部分会被激活,产生情感投射的效果。

💡神经塑性

所谓神经塑性,指大脑和神经系统可以根据需要重组或建立新的连接和路径。视频中新的研究证实,阅读小说可以改变读者大脑结构,提高其神经塑性。

💡移情

移情指将自身的情感和态度暂时转移到另一个人或事物上。视频中提到读小说能培养我们的移情能力。

💡支持社会凝聚力

视频最后认为,读小说不仅对个人有益,也有助于社会整体,因为通过读书我们会变得更有同情心,这是社会凝聚力的基础。

Highlights

Reading fiction can make you more imaginative, improve your memory and relationships, and make you a nicer person.

Fiction reading exercises our ability to intuit what others are thinking and feeling from their expressions and actions.

Reading fiction allows us to imagine other perspectives, expanding our understanding beyond our own limited view.

Transcripts

Translator: Rosa Baranda Reviewer: Peter van de Ven

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

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

probably improve your personal relationships,

and make you a nicer person,

you would probably be very skeptical.

And even more so if I said it costs nothing

and probably everybody in this room can already do it.

Now, you will probably have guessed by now

that I'm talking about reading -

there's a clue in the title.

But I'm not talking about the sort of reading

that we all know is incredibly important;

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

the sort of reading we do for administration,

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

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

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

where it takes you right inside

the character's emotions and feelings and actions

so you are seeing it from their perspective.

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

and at worst quite often as a waste of time.

I mean, I remember my mother telling me

that when she was a child she was crazy about books

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

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

What I want to tell you today

is that, surprisingly, fiction is very useful indeed,

in ways that we probably never previously suspected;

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

And I have some new evidence,

which comes rather surprisingly out of the brain sciences,

to support that, which I'll come to.

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

in 2013 there was a series of experiments

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

What they did was take people and ask them to read

quite short passages from various types of books.

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

and some of them where thrillers, plots,

where you read about the events happening in a story

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

And the third sort

was the sort of fiction I am talking about,

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

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

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

and they were asked to judge from the expressions alone

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

This is actually quite a standard test

for something that we call 'Theory of Mind',

which is a rather bad phrase, I think,

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

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

And that is the intuitive ability

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

what is going on in their head.

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

to step outside our own heads

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

And the same faculty, by extension,

opens up whole worlds to us

because it allows us to imagine what it's like

to be somewhere else, doing something else,

seeing it in a different way.

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

particularly in social life -

they find relationships very difficult -

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

Because without that ability to step outside yourself,

it's difficult to imagine anything, really.

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

We're all quite familiar with it.

I want to tell you about a particular -

A few years ago, I went to a reading group

which was for people with various types of mental issues.

A lot of them had had severe depression or anxiety,

and they had come together to start a reading group.

And I joined several months in,

when it was already having effect.

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

the English novel,

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

had to decide between marrying either boring old Linton

or this wildly exciting tempestuous chap, Heathcliff.

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

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

before I could consent to forsake Heathcliff.

- Stop there, Faye.

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

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

- Definitely!

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

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

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

and then you get the sense

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

- She's marrying someone under false pretenses.

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

Imagine marrying Katherine

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

And he will, he will find out.

- I think deep down she should be with Heathcliff.

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

- Yeah. - Yes.

- And I think she should go for it.

(Laughter)

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

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

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

I know that -

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

Now, the question that occurred to me was,

What on Earth is happening in people's brains

to have this rather profound effect, this pastime?

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

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

and that they join together to form pathways,

which have electricity zapping back and forth endlessly,

and that electricity ebb and flow

is our thoughts, our emotions, and our feelings.

Some of these pathways are pretty similar in all of us

because they're actually built into our genes.

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

which take light from the eyes to the visual cortex,

so the back of our head.

On the other side of the frame,

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

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

Now, I just want to show you quickly

the difference between speaking and reading

because they are very different.

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

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

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

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

But reading is not.

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

from the day it's born,

and it would never start spontaneously reading.

It has to be taught how to do it.

And this is the reason speech has been with us

for at least 100,000 years,

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

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

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

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

intuitive, if you like, pathways,

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

And that means making new pathways, individual pathways,

the sort that individuals do make all through their life.

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

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

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

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

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

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

then sort of chunks forward.

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

until by the time it gets to that blue area,

which is the first of the major language areas,

it is then able to put a word to it.

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

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

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

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

to actually make the word.

That's how speaking works.

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

But reading is a very different kettle of fish.

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

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

we have to create all those new connections

in many, many different parts of the brain.

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

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

These are really complicated networks

that are being formed in the brain when we read.

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

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

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

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

is that when we read things about somebody doing something,

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

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

that would be active if they were doing it themselves,

become active.

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

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

but basically -

These are brain scans of people,

you can see from the color chart below,

they're reading.

The actual movement produces the pattern on your left,

and when you're reading it,

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

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

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

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

Because the important thing about reading

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

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

And there's a very big difference there.

It's the same with everything.

With pain -

if watch or read about somebody in pain,

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

will become active as well.

And some people feel this so much

that they actually do feel and report the pain.

Same with anger, same with any emotion,

same even with quite complicated intellectual things,

like judgments, moral judgments, and so on.

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

Some researchers from Emory University in the States

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

We know already from the earlier work

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

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

And this researchers set out to see

if this was something that could actually be seen

inside of the brain, physically.

So they had students,

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

reading a passage of a particularly engaging and exciting novel

with a lot of inside-character driven stuff.

It was actually 'Pompeii', by Robert Harris,

if you want to do the same thing yourself.

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

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

to get a baseline

of what their brains looked like before.

Then they had them read,

and every night after they had read a passage,

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

And every day there were differences.

The differences,

this is a sort of schematic picture of where the differences where found,

the connections,

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

they got thicker and denser.

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

not just in the language areas,

everywhere.

Basically, what these people seemed to be doing

was giving themselves a really good workout.

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

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

They had actually lived an experience,

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

So in conclusion,

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

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

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

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

because the brain is like a muscle:

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

to sympathize, to empathize with other people,

the more empathetic a society we will have.

Thank you.

(Applause)