Name: フィクションを読むのは時間の無駄？ (Is Reading Fiction a Waste of Time?)
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T11:24:14.000Z
Duration: 5 min 48 s
Description: VoiceTubeの動画で発音を聞きながら英語表現を覚えよう！学べる英語：

- So I like to think that I read a lot of books,

様態の副詞

but actually the majority of what I read is fiction

程度の副詞

rather than kinda useful productivity books.

So I always have a fantasy series going on Audible,

of paranormal romance type genre book on Kindle

But as a self-professed productivity grease monkey,

I've often wondered, is reading fiction a waste of time,

I feel bad about watching TV or playing video games

until four o'clock in the morning reading

about some werewolf and how he's fallen in love

but for some reason reading feels more legit

the series where we look at scientific papers

we're analyzing whether reading fiction is good for you

or if I should donate my multiple signed copies

American author Ann Patchett famously said,

to feel empathy for people we've never met,

living lives we couldn't possibly experience for ourselves,

because the book puts us inside the character's skin."

So I'm a doctor, in case you didn't know,

but to get into med school I had to convince a bunch

I've always kinda struggled to relate to people

when it comes to the realm of negative emotions.

I'm a pretty happy and privileged guy in general,

and so if someone else is feeling stressed or angry or sad,

I often find it hard to really kind of appreciate

The good news is that apparently reading fiction helps

So we've got this meta-analysis from 2018

that looked at 14 different studies all around this link

between empathy and fiction, and they found that,

"Compared to nonfiction reading or no reading,

that reading fiction helps reduce our prejudice and bias,

which is particularly important in these sorts of times.

This study from 2014, for example, said that,

to ameliorate biased categorical and emotional perception

And in fact, my own first real understanding

of racism as a thing came from reading Malorie Blackman's

to help boost my empathy, but there's even some evidence

that reading fiction helps boost our cognitive brainpower

conducted by the the website testyourvocab.com,

found that reading builds our vocabulary,

but they also discovered that those who read fiction

in particular had a much more varied and deeper vocabulary

So reading fiction expands our vernacular

that different parts of our brain light up

when we're reading different sorts of fiction.

We've got this study from 2013, for example,

we get the lighting up of our left temporal cortex,

which is the bit of the brain that deals with language.

but this study from Spain showed that if you read words

that reading those words lights up the smell regions

And we've got this study from France that shows

that if you read about different motor activities,

it lights up different parts of the motor cortex.

would light up a different part of the brain