Amount of fiction reading correlates with higher connectivity between cortical areas for language and mentalizing

Abstract

Behavioral evidence suggests that engaging with fiction is positively correlated with social abilities. The rationale behind this link is that engaging with fiction and fictional characters may offer a training mode for mentalizing and empathizing with sentient agents in the real world, analogous to a flight simulator for pilots. In this study, we explored the relationship between reading fiction and mentalizing by looking at brain network dynamics in 57 participants who varied on how much fiction they read in their daily lives. The hypothesis was that if reading fiction indeed trains mentalizing, a task that requires mentalizing -Like immersing in a fictional story and engaging with a protagonist-should elicit differences in brain network dynamics depending on how much people read. More specifically, more frequent readers should show increased connectivity within the theory of mind network (ToM) or between the ToM network and other brain networks. While brain activation was measured with fMRI, participants listened to two literary narratives. We computed time-course correlations between brain regions and compared the correlation values from listening to narratives to listening to an auditory baseline condition. The between-region correlations were then related to individual differences measures including the amount of fiction that participants consume in their daily lives. Our results show that there is a linear relationship between how much people read and the functional connectivity in areas known to be involved in language and mentalizing. This adds neurobiological credibility to the fiction influences mentalizing abilities hypothesis as suggested on the basis of conceptual analysis.