What a Bestseller About Vesuvius Does to Your Brain

We all know that Netflix is going to take down a bunch of movies by the start of the new year, so no one needs to make a compelling case for binge-watching—it’s basically the way to take an idle pleasure cruise through time. But new research just emerged that makes a case for making slightly more effort as you’re lying on the couch watching the holiday dwindle—reading a compelling novel shows results in your brain.

This year researchers already made the case—perhaps not terribly well—that reading literary fiction can increase one’s empathy for others. But researchers at Emory University published a study in Brain Connectivity, in which they found that reading the historical thriller Pompeii by Robert Harris heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex and the effect lasted after the novel was finished.

For five days, participants came in every morning for a fMRI scan, to establish a baseline of their resting brain. Then for the next nine days they received a section of Pompeii to read the night before. Their brains were scanned the morning after, and for five days following the book’s completion.

The results showed heightened connectivity in the area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, on the mornings following the reading assignments. Comparable research had been done with people reading short stories while receiving an fMRI, whereas the Emory team looked at the effect the next day.

“Even though the participants were not actually reading the novel while they were in the scanner, they retained this heightened connectivity,” Gregory Berns, the study’s lead author, said. “We call that a ‘shadow activity,’ almost like a muscle memory.”

Burns also said that there was heightened connectivity found in the central sulcus of the brain—the primary sensory motor region of the brain, where neurons have been associated with making representations of sensation of the body. “The neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist,” Berns told esciencecommons. “We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.”

And it’s not like this was an especially arduous amount of reading that was literally changing the brain’s wiring—basically just 30 pages a night of a best seller, which should leave plenty of time for Netflixing, if you're so inclined.

However, if you're a denizen of the binge-watching arts, just wait. For a long time—up to and including the present—reading fiction and especially the best-selling non-classic variety, was regarded as a waste of time. Now that there are other distractions for the kids, reading anything at all is considered admirable. After all, we're already seeing the upside to video games.