Pete Ryan

Greetings from an evangelist for a declining field: literature!

English majors, like all humanities majors, are on the wane. In the US alone, one-third of the degrees from liberal arts colleges were awarded in the humanities before 2011; now just one-quarter are. At research universities, humanities degrees have dropped from 17% to 11%.

So, in some ways, it makes sense that the study of literature is less popular. But guess what else is on the outs? Empathy. A study which analyzed 15,000 college students found that they’re scoring 40% lower in empathy than those in the past.

What’s the connection? I’ve spent the past two decades in the classroom teaching literature, and what I deeply believe — and what the emerging field of literary neuroscience is beginning to prove — is that literature makes us more empathetic.

Are we frustrated or sympathetic with Hamlet’s reluctance to avenge his father? When Jane Eyre realizes Mr. Rochester is married, do we urge her to flee Thornfield, or to stay?

During engaged reading, we compare the protagonist’s actions to what we’d do in a similar situation or what we’ve done in the past. The mind-reading we do when thinking through a character helps us develop social sensitivity, as demonstrated ingeniously by the “reading the mind in the eyes” test. In this study, participants were presented with a series of gray-scale photos cropped to reveal only a person’s eyes. They were then asked to identify the expression contained in the eyes from four options. Turns out, regular readers of fiction scored higher on this test, and I think it’s because reading gives us practice taking on another’s point of view. We may stereotype bookworms as paste-eating, socially awkward loners, but reading literature helps us read the room.

How do books pull off their magic trick of transporting us into another person’s body? Taking a look at the brain — specifically, the multiple regions that engage and coordinate when we read — gives us a clue.

One of my favorite authors is Jane Austen, and in one of my favorite studies, literature PhD students were given a Jane Austen novel to read — but not on a couch. Instead, they read the Austen inside a fMRI Machine, which depicts brain activity by detecting changes in blood flow. Natalie Phillips, the literary scholar who worked on the study, hypothesized that the subjects, while reading, would experience an increase in blood to the areas of the brain responsible for processing language. To her surprise, the students experienced a dramatic global increase, with blood flowing to areas that have nothing to do with processing language.

Say you read a passage about running through a forest. You’d expect the left temporal lobe, the area responsible for language processing, to light up. It does — but so does the frontal lobe’s motor cortex, which coordinates the body’s movements. In fact, it lights up in the same way it would if you were actually running. Say you read the words “lavender” or “coffee” or “cinnamon.” You’ll experience the activity we’d expect in your left temporal lobe but you’d also have activity in your olfactory cortex, which lights up in the same way it would if you were actually smelling those scents.

This kind of activity doesn’t happen with fact-based nonfiction, such as political journalism, movie reviews, or Ikea bookshelf assembly manuals. That Ikea manual might result in a cool bookcase, but if you want to light up your brain like fireworks on the Fourth of July, you need to stock that bookcase with Jane Austen (and read it).

Is there any practical application to this increased brain connectivity? 

What if I told you that empathy we feel for characters could make people less racist? That what was demonstrated by Dan Johnson, who used Saffron Dreams, a novel from the point of view of a Muslim-American woman, to see if empathetic reading could reduce racial bias. For his study, Johnson divided the participants into two groups. Half of them read a 3,000-word excerpt from the novel. The other half read a 500-word synopsis of that excerpt, which retained all the facts but none of the character’s rich interior life, dialogue or metaphors, or sensory details that make a book come alive. Afterwards, participants were presented with photos of what Johnson described as “ambiguous Arab-Caucasian faces,” some of which appeared angry. When asked to identify the race of the person in the photo, participants who read the fact-based synopsis were disproportionately likely to categorize the angry faces as Arab. This bias was absent among those who read the lush, transporting excerpt.

Children, too, can improve their opinions about stigmatized groups through reading, as proven in a study using the first Harry Potter book in Italy, a country where immigrants are often stigmatized. The control group read a passage in which Harry gets his first wand. The other group read a passage relating to prejudice, in which Draco Malfoy, a shockingly blond pure-blood wizard, calls Harry’s friend Hermione “a filthy little Mudblood.” A week later, the children’s attitudes were assessed, and those who’d read the passages dealing with prejudice had significantly improved attitudes towards immigrants.

These findings make me think of the students in my office who are struggling over whether or not to choose to be an English major because they want to be successful. If by “success,” they mean the highest average starting salary, perhaps I should lead them from the English building towards the Business Administration building. But if success means helping to create a more harmonious world, pull up a chair.

I know some folks play fantasy football; I play fantasy fiction seminar and my “players” are those most in need of the heightened brain connectivity that literature induces — namely world leaders and policymakers. Imagine if, before initiating aggressive military action, leaders had to read a novel from the point of view of an enemy combatant. Imagine if, before cutting social services, legislators had to inhabit the interior life of a person who is on welfare. Imagine if leaders couldn’t set a prison sentence or create immigration policy until they’d aced my midterm. We would have a world in which decisions are informed by empathetic imaginations, processed by brains experiencing increases of blood flow to multiple areas of the brain.

I’ve been discussing all the ways that literature educates us emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually, but I’d like to end with what it does for us hedonistically.

Don’t read because it’s good for you. Read because it’s good. Doesn’t it taste so good to suck a novel’s sweet juice? Reading not only helps us feel — it helps us feel better. Books make us less isolated. As James Baldwin once put it, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

The best takeaway from literary neuroscience is that our beautiful brains are tremendously malleable. We can change our minds, literally.

So why not give it a try? Go lose yourself in a book. Which is also to say: Go find yourself. And, while you’re at it, find the rest of us, too.

This article was adapted from a TEDxUniversityofMississippi Talk. Watch it here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Beth Ann Fennelly is the poet laureate of Mississippi and teaches in the MFA Program at the University of Mississippi, where she was named Outstanding Teacher of the Year. Her sixth book, Heating & Cooling: 52 Micro-Memoirs (W. W. Norton) was an Atlanta Journal Constitution Best Book of 2017. Learn more at http://www.bethannfennelly.com

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.

Angus Greig

Empathy — or understanding the thoughts and feelings of the people around us — is one of the most important and most trying parts of being social creatures.

But what exactly is empathy? And crucially, can we have more?

Stanford psychology professor Jamil Zaki PhD, director of the Social Neuroscience Laboratory there, studies these very questions. In a TEDxMarin talk, he says that human empathy is actually a skill that can be developed rather than a fixed trait. “Empathy is a simple word for a complex idea,” he explains. “Research psychologists understand empathy as an umbrella terms for multiple ways that we respond to other people’s emotions.”

Why is empathy so important? Some of the reasons are more obvious: “It inspires us to help family members, friends, and strangers,” says Dr. Zaki. “It helps us see past differences and allows us to see others who are of a different race or a generation or ideology from our own, without the lens of stereotyping, prejudice, or bias.”

But he also believes it’s not just others that benefit from empathy — so does the person feeling it. “People who experience empathy also tend to be less stressed and depressed, more satisfied with their lives, happier in their relationships, and more successful at work,” he says.

Dr. Zaki distinguishes between three types of empathy: cognitive empathy, emotional empathy, and empathic concern or compassion. To unpack these types, imagine that you’re having lunch with a friend when they get a phone call. You don’t know who they’re talking to, but at some point, your friend starts to cry.

“As you see your friend break down, you might start to feel lousy yourself,” Dr. Zaki says. “Taking on their feelings — which we’d call emotional empathy — is that vicarious sharing of what someone else is going through. You also might try to figure out what they’re feeling and why, and that’s what we’d call cognitive empathy. And if you’re a good friend, you probably care about what they’re going through and wish for them to feel better, and we’d call that empathic concern or compassion.”

Of course, empathy is not always possible nor is it always the wisest response. Dr. Zaki is quick to point out that we do not owe anyone our empathy. For example, if you find yourself unable to empathize with a person or people who actively seek to destroy or disparage the group you’re in, it’s not a failure. He says, too, that “empathy can run counter to justice and can sometimes give us tunnel vision, in wanting to help some people over others.” The empathy you have for a good friend may convince you that they should be allowed to jump the line for a COVID vaccine ahead of someone who actually needs it more.

Still, Dr. Zaki believes that we all have a responsibility to cultivate empathy in “the same way that we try to take care of our bodies or of our mental health,” he explains. “I think of building empathy as a way to take care of our social health.” Through his introductory seminar at Stanford on empathy (and from where the below exercises are from) and in his book The War for Kindness: Building Empathy in a Fractured World, he helps people train to become more empathic.

Here, he lays out five exercises to help build your empathy:

Exercise #1: Strengthen your internal resources

For this exercise, think about something you’re struggling with and how it makes you feel. Then imagine a friend coming to you with that same problem and how you’d respond to them. Doing this can highlight the chasm between the kindness we give to the people in our lives and the kindness (or lack of) that we show ourselves. You’ll probably find a significant difference in how you’d treat your friend — most likely with patience, generosity and forgiveness — versus how you’d react to yourself — perhaps with blame, harshness and self-criticism. High-achieving people like Dr. Zaki’s students, he says, often struggle to do this exercise.

What does this have to do with empathy? “Empathy has to start at home,” points out Dr. Zaki. “You can’t just give of yourself emotionally until there’s nothing left.” By building self-compassion, we are increasing our capacity for empathy.

Exercise #2: Feeling spent? Spend kindness on others

At some point in your day, especially when you’re stressed or feel like you don’t have any spare bandwidth, spend in some small way — whether it’s in time, energy or money — on someone in your life. Send a text message of support to someone who’s having a hard time. When you’re running errands, pick up your partner’s favorite coffee. Carry an older neighbor’s groceries upstairs. “Building empathy isn’t necessarily about donating half of your salary to charity. It’s about the little things that we do each day,” says Dr. Zaki. “It’s about habits of mind.”

In an attempt to conserve energy for ourselves, we tend to turn inwards when under pressure. While it may seem counterintuitive, Dr. Zaki has seen that performing these tiny acts — especially at moments when we feel like we can’t — can be energizing and enlivening. “Students are happily surprised to find that when they give to others, they don’t end up depleting themselves,” he says. “Happiness and well-being are not a zero-sum situation.”

Exercise #3: Disagree without debating

Have a conversation with someone you disagree with. But rather than debating or discussing the contentious issue, share your story of how you came to form your opinion and then listen to how they arrived at theirs.

This is likely to be the most uncomfortable of the exercises, but it’s worth doing given our current social climate in which a person’s ideology can be equated with their personality.
Note: Do not do this exercise with someone who harms or denigrates you or the group you belong to.

This exercise is based on what’s called “deep canvassing,” a strategy that’s used by some activists where they have 10-15-minute, two-way, emotionally-engaged conversations with the people they’re trying to persuade. Although deep canvassing has the intention of trying to change someone else’s mind, that’s not the aim of doing this exercise. Its point is to show us that it’s possible to disagree with another person without disliking them or seeing them as the enemy. “Empathy does not mean condoning — but it can mean understanding,” says Dr. Zaki. When his students do this exercise, he reports, “They’re often surprised at how respectful and human conversation across difference can be.”

Exercise #4: Use technology to connect, not just to click and comment

For this exercise, think of how you currently use your phone and rethink how you might use it differently. “Try to be intentional about technology as a medium in which human connection can exist and which you can try to pursue that connection,” says Dr. Zaki.

Many of us pick up our phones only to look up an hour later to realize we’ve spent the time doing a whole lot of aimless scrolling and clicking and not much else. For a few days, do an internal audit each time you catch yourself looking up from your phone. Take notice of how you feel, what (if anything) you’ve gained, and what you’ve retained. By asking yourself basic questions — “What am I thinking? Is this what I want to be doing? What do I feel right now?” — you have the chance to look at its impact on you and your well-being.

This exercise is not designed to build empathy itself but rather to help us bring kindness and humanity to the online platforms where we spend much of our time. When you can, try to use your digital interactions as a chance to better connect with others. This could mean having more real-time interactions and conversations. Instead of just leaving an emoji on a friend’s Instagram post, why not directly text or call them? “The worst thing you can do for your sense of human connection,” Zaki says, “Is to just lurk on various platforms and let anger and other negative feelings seep into you like a young Darth Vader.”

Exercise #5: Praise empathy in others

Just like we’re conditioned to compliment other people on a great style choice or work accomplishment, let’s make it a habit to shout out empathic behavior when we see it, says Dr. Zaki. For this exercise, take a moment in your meetings — whether online or in person — to recognize the people on your team whenever they help others achieve their goals. “A lot of our attention tends to go towards the loudest voices, which are not necessarily the kindest voices,” he points out. “When we notice the good around us, it balances our attention a little bit.”

Feel free to do these exercises in any order you’d like and for as long as you’d like. In fact, why not turn them into a lifelong practice? The more that we can cultivate our own empathy and encourage it in others, the more we’ll be contributing to an overall culture of kindness. “There’s a fair amount of research on kindness contagion — the idea that when we see it, we’re more likely to engage in it ourselves,” adds Dr. Zaki. “By calling kindness out, we’re more likely to make it magnetic through that social force.”

Watch his TEDxMarin Talk here:

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Thu-Huong Ha is a freelance writer. Previously she was the books and culture reporter for Quartz and the context editor at TED. Her writing has also appeared on Slate and in The New York Times Book Review. Her debut novel, Hail Caesar, was published in 2007 by PUSH, a YA imprint of Scholastic, and was named an NYPL Book for the Teen Age. Follow her at twitter.com/thu

This post was originally published on TED Ideas. It’s part of the “How to Be a Better Human” series, each of which contains a piece of helpful advice from someone in the TED community; browse through all the posts here.