I can’t remember when I started following The New Yorker on Instagram but I think it was because of their funny cartoons. I realised that although I was bookmarking many of their articles because the titles seemed very interesting, I wasn’t actually clicking through to read them as much. I then saw that for a very reasonable subscription, I could get 16 issues delivered at home and I could gain access to all their content online. I’ve since downloaded their app on my iPhone, saved many articles there and started reading more and more.
Funnily enough, one of the first titles that caught my attention was ‘Can reading make you happier?‘ from 2015. In it Ceridwen Dovey talks about her experience with Bibliotherapy at the the School of Life which I found fascinating. I instantly thought it would make a great present for my wife as she’s an avid-reader. Here’s an excerpt about history of bibliotherapy:
Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect.
Berthoud and Elderkin trace the method of bibliotherapy all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, “who inscribed above the entrance to a library in Thebes that this was a ‘healing place for the soul.’ ” The practice came into its own at the end of the nineteenth century, when Sigmund Freud began using literature during psychoanalysis sessions. After the First World War, traumatized soldiers returning home from the front were often prescribed a course of reading. “Librarians in the States were given training on how to give books to WWI vets, and there’s a nice story about Jane Austen’s novels being used for bibliotherapeutic purposes at the same time in the U.K.,” Elderkin says. Later in the century, bibliotherapy was used in varying ways in hospitals and libraries, and has more recently been taken up by psychologists, social and aged-care workers, and doctors as a viable mode of therapy.
Today, bibliotherapy takes many different forms, from literature courses run for prison inmates to reading circles for elderly people suffering from dementia. Sometimes it can simply mean one-on-one or group sessions for “lapsed” readers who want to find their way back to an enjoyment of books.
Early on in the article, the author articulates a feeling which reminded me of one of the main reasons why I started this blog:
I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people—or different things to the same person—at various points in our lives.
To see this from a different angle, people will take away different things from books, films, podcasts… at different times in their lives compared to themselves and others. I’m interested in learning what different people glean out, are inspired from and why. Like I wrote in an early post about the positives I hope this website could have, “My Excerpts could serve as a way of discovering and learning about new ideas and information. Imagine being able to follow what your favourite people have taken away from a particular book, film, podcast, talk, etc.?“
I also found it very interesting that the most common ailments people tend to bring up are things like “being stuck in a rut in your career, feeling depressed in your relationship, or suffering bereavement.” It struck me that all of these are also very common feelings that we all experience at different points in our lives so maybe we should all be looking to do more therapy, bibliotherapy or others.
Going back to the title, of course reading books can be good for you in many ways. Now thanks to new studies, we’re understanding more about why and how this is.
For all avid readers who have been self-medicating with great books their entire lives, it comes as no surprise that reading books can be good for your mental health and your relationships with others, but exactly why and how is now becoming clearer, thanks to new research on reading’s effects on the brain. Since the discovery, in the mid-nineties, of “mirror neurons”—neurons that fire in our brains both when we perform an action ourselves and when we see an action performed by someone else—the neuroscience of empathy has become clearer. A 2011 study published in the Annual Review of Psychology, based on analysis of fMRI brain scans of participants, showed that, when people read about an experience, they display stimulation within the same neurological regions as when they go through that experience themselves. We draw on the same brain networks when we’re reading stories and when we’re trying to guess at another person’s feelings.
Other studies published in 2006 and 2009 showed something similar—that people who read a lot of fiction tend to be better at empathizing with others (even after the researchers had accounted for the potential bias that people with greater empathetic tendencies may prefer to read novels). And, in 2013, an influential study published in Science found that reading literary fiction (rather than popular fiction or literary nonfiction) improved participants’ results on tests that measured social perception and empathy, which are crucial to “theory of mind”: the ability to guess with accuracy what another human being might be thinking or feeling, a skill humans only start to develop around the age of four.
Reading makes you more empathetic. As simple as that.
As a final note, my wife really liked the gift. She filled in and sent the questionnaire about her reading habits a few days ago and had her session on the phone this morning. After the call, she came over to tell me about it and she was buzzing. I can’t remember the last time I saw her that excited and it made me very happy.
My Excerpts 