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Posts tagged: stories

During the act of reading engaging fiction, we can lose all sense of time. By the final chapter of the right book, we feel changed in our own lives, even if what we’ve read is entirely made up.

Research says that’s because while you’re engaged in fiction—unlike nonfiction—you’re given a safe arena to experience emotions without the need for self-protection. Since the events you’re reading about do not follow you into your own life, you can feel strong emotions freely.

[…]

The key metric the researchers used is “emotionally transported,” or how deeply connected we are to the story. Previous research has shown that when we read stories about people experiencing specific emotions or events it triggers activity in our brains as if we were right there in the thick of the action.

New study by Dutch researchers confirms previous theories that reading fiction makes you a better person by expanding your capacity for empathy.

Also see how storytelling makes us human.

(via explore-blog)

I would be interested in seeing a similar study done with other narrative media. Graphic novels, manga, and comic books, seem to follow the description of an empathic work that does not follow your life and allows you to experience the emotions of others.“ And it is still a reading experience. But I feel like taking it further into television and movies might be bordering on poor scholarship. By the same token, what of short stories? Short short stories? Flash fiction? Fan fiction drabbles? (For the purposes of fiction prose, a fan fiction that is 200k words would, I assume, be no different than original fiction of the same sort…)

I would be really interested to see this kind of work replicated with video games - particularly video games of different levels of linearity and plot. Does having your choices impacting the story change the level of empathy or immersion? In which direction? Certainly even a running around and chasing butterflies in skyrim or building houses in the Sims can make us "lose all sense of time,” but what of the claim of empathy?

I feel like the study almost demands to be done with different types of games, what with the claims out there in the news that video games cause the opposite of empathetic growth.

I just worry about researchers outside of the gaming community lumping something relatively freeform, or prized for its freeform play with a more story and character driven game.

I suppose I am similarly curious if the study found the increase in empathy for fiction to be true regardless of the material. Does Lolita and American Psycho produce the same increased empathic skills as One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest or even something more mainstream like Harry Potter?

If we are going to apply something designed for precision like the scientific method to something as vague and hand-wavy as “fiction” and “empathy” then we might as well go all the way, no?

We are, as a species, addicted to story. Even when the body goes to sleep, the mind stays up all night, telling itself stories.
Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (via dracarysh)
We tell ourselves stories in order to live. The princess is caged in the consulate. The man with the candy will lead the children into the sea. The naked woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor is a victim of accidie, or the naked woman is an exhibitionist, and it would be “interesting” to know which. We tell ourselves that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest or is about to be, the Aristophanic view, snatched back to the human condition by the fireman in priest’s clothing just visible in the window behind her, the one smiling at the telephoto lens. We look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson in the murder of five. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the “ideas” with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience.
Joan Didion, “The White Album” (via lifeinpoetry)

noonturnsmidnight:

Sometimes I feel like my immense love of stories is inappropriate but then I remember that I don’t care.

Stories socialise us, they shape our identity, our behaviour, our dreams and our ideas of right and wrong. 

We form intimate relationships with the stories we consume and they matter to us. They are alive in us. 

And that’s why I am and always will be passionate about stories and the art of storytelling and the messages stories convey.