How does reading fiction differ from watching a show or those videos on social media platforms?
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I will comment as someone who does cognitive assessments. Reading is not a simple universal activity, and neither is watching TV or videos. Every person reads differently and we read different things differently. You read a quick paperback differently than you read a textbook you are going to be tested upon. So the cognitive skills involved can be very different. It is possible to “read” or “watch tv” and passively go through the motions with no significant cognitive involvement. The experience of reading or watching is inside of the person’s brain, not in the external material.
You can know how one person reads certain things with a certain intent at a certain time, but you cannot generalize this. It is one of the irritating things seen on the many subreddits about books and videos. People say, “I want a book (or video) that will make me do X, or feel X.” As if there is something that resides in the material and everyone who reads a book or watches a video has the same experience. It simply does not work that way.
I will comment as someone who does cognitive assessments. Reading is not a simple universal activity, and neither is watching TV or videos. Every person reads differently and we read different things differently. You read a quick paperback differently than you read a textbook you are going to be tested upon. So the cognitive skills involved can be very different. It is possible to “read” or “watch tv” and passively go through the motions with no significant cognitive involvement. The experience of reading or watching is inside of the person’s brain, not in the external material.
You can know how one person reads certain things with a certain intent at a certain time, but you cannot generalize this. It is one of the irritating things seen on the many subreddits about books and videos. People say, “I want a book (or video) that will make me do X, or feel X.” As if there is something that resides in the material and everyone who reads a book or watches a video has the same experience. It simply does not work that way.
Yes. Reading is active compared to passive. A movie keeps going if you look at your phone or go to the bathroom. A book stops when you don’t read it.
Also the parts of you that visualise the story is engaged.
It’s a different interaction with your imagination. Instead of having a scene built for you, you have to build it in your own mind, and it allows for more variation between one person and another in how these things are seen.
Yes. Reading is active compared to passive. A movie keeps going if you look at your phone or go to the bathroom. A book stops when you don’t read it.
Also the parts of you that visualise the story is engaged.
It’s a different interaction with your imagination. Instead of having a scene built for you, you have to build it in your own mind, and it allows for more variation between one person and another in how these things are seen.
I think just reading in general does this. I don’t know what parts each activity activates but they definitely have different effects for me!
I think just reading in general does this. I don’t know what parts each activity activates but they definitely have different effects for me!
Raymond Mar did a study on this and found pretty definitive evidence that reading fiction increases empathy in humans. Compared to watching television/movies/etc or reading non-fiction, reading fiction has a dramatic correlation to higher levels of empathy and it can be shown that this is at least partially causation as well, not just that people with higher empathy are drawn to fiction but that reading fiction actually increases empathy in the reader.
Because reading is more of an active process and requires imagining the characters and feelings and situations, it is extremely different of a process than watching something, which tends to be a passive activity.
https://www.yorku.ca/mar/Mar%20et%20al%202009_reading%20fiction%20and%20empathy.pdf
Raymond Mar did a study on this and found pretty definitive evidence that reading fiction increases empathy in humans. Compared to watching television/movies/etc or reading non-fiction, reading fiction has a dramatic correlation to higher levels of empathy and it can be shown that this is at least partially causation as well, not just that people with higher empathy are drawn to fiction but that reading fiction actually increases empathy in the reader.
Because reading is more of an active process and requires imagining the characters and feelings and situations, it is extremely different of a process than watching something, which tends to be a passive activity.
https://www.yorku.ca/mar/Mar%20et%20al%202009_reading%20fiction%20and%20empathy.pdf
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