In passing, this is what the writer
Rosa Montero
said last week: "You were talking before about the power of
literature
to
get closer
to the other, to those who are different and we must remember that reading novels makes people more
empathetic
."
A while before, his colleague
De ella Sergio del Molino
had won the XXVII Alfaguara Prize for novels with
The Germans
.
Electronic book players.
Photo.
Maxi Failla.
Excited, Del Molino had indeed valued the power of stories: "We live in
tough times
and I hope that literature tries to create the fiction that the other
is not an absolute stranger
to try to mitigate the mystery of the other so that
we cannot dehumanize him.
" , he said about his novel.
The desire of a Spanish writer and the hasty reference of Rosa Montero go beyond good intentions.
Reading builds empathy
.
Not the authors but the
scientists
say it .
Social psychologists
Emanuele
Castano (from the University of Trento, Italy) and David Comer Kidd (from Harvard University, in the USA), in a report published by
Science
magazine , showed years ago that reading fiction enriches empathy and also emotional intelligence.
Stories and gestures
To do this, they called a group of volunteers between 18 and 75 years old and confirmed that those people who
had read fiction
had a greater ability to interpret other people's gestures and detect the
emotions
they expressed.
Summer reading among the boys.
Photo: Andres D'Elia
Asked by
The New York Times
,
Albert Wendland
, who directs a master's program in fiction writing at Seton Hill University, agreed: "Reading long, sensitive explorations of people's lives, that kind of "Fiction
is literally putting yourself in someone else's position
– lives that might be more difficult, more complex. It makes sense that they would discover that, yes, that can lead to greater empathy and understanding of other lives."
But, in addition, the more knowledge of the brain
advances
and the clearer it becomes that reading as an activity of decoding a text demands a series of complex and synchronized
mental processes
: perception, of course, but also memory, reasoning.
When reading novels
loses
space in front of screens.
When screens enable
the dehumanization of those who are (or think) different from
anonymity .
When there are no consequences if
you attack or threaten
, because it is barely necessary to type almost without thinking.
It is at that moment that it is urgent to return to fictions, to remind us that, as humans,
we are with others
.