#keith oatley

[bones-ivy-breath]

... fiction is not just a slice of life, not just entertainment, not just escape from the everyday. It often includes these, but at its center, it is a guided dream, a model that we readers and viewers construct in collaboration with the writer, which can enable us to see others and ourselves more clearly. The dream can offer us glimpses beneath the surface of the everyday world.

Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction by Keith Oatley

[lunamarish]

Più "divori" pagine di alta letteratura e più migliora un'abilità conosciuta come Theory of Mind, teoria della mente, che consente di prevedere gli stati d’animo di chi ci è di fronte.

Una caratteristica che affonda le radici nell'empatia, inevitabile quando aprendo un libro ci si immedesima nei personaggi descritti.

Si tratti del buono o del cattivo di turno, poco importa, la dinamica è sempre la stessa: si vivono le sue avventure, si cerca di capirne idee, stati d'animo e, perché no, persino di anticiparne le mosse.

Il salto dal mondo immaginario al reale è breve: si allena la mente. Si addestra il cuore. Si affina l'intuito.

È la rivincita dei lettori, alla faccia di chi li accusa di non comprendere la realtà, eternamente immersi con la testa nelle nuvole.

Sono da escludere i cosiddetti "volumetti rosa".

Un carattere prevedibile o una dinamica scontata sono poca cosa per i nostri neuroni rispetto al racconto che ribalta gli stereotipi e distrugge ogni attesa.

Con uno shock letterario che ci prepara all'imprevedibile o, almeno, ci prova. Non è una questione di contenuto, ma di processo.

Quando leggiamo accendiamo le nostre competenze empatiche.

Keith Oatley

[muchadoaboutpineapples]

Fiction and poetry are constructed in the imagination, and are different from something discovered in physics, or from something that happened, as in on the news. Fiction and poetry are not false; they are about what could happen.

Keith Oatley, Such Stuff as Dreams

[hours]

"[F]iction is doing something that all political factions should be able to get behind. Beyond the local battles of the culture wars, virtually all storytelling, regardless of genre, increases society's fund of empathy and reinforces an ethic of decency that is deeper than politics.

For a long time literary critics and philosophers have argued, along with the novelist George Eliot, that one of fiction's main jobs is to 'enlarge men's sympathies.' Recent lab work suggests they are right. The psychologists [Raymond] Mar and Keith Oatley tested the idea that entering fiction's simulated social worlds enhances our ability to connect with actual human beings. They found that heavy fiction readers outperformed heavy nonfiction readers on tests of empathy, even after they controlled for the possibility that people who already had high empathy might naturally gravitate to fiction. As Oatley puts it, fiction serves the function of 'making the world a better place by improving interpersonal understanding.'"

— Jonathan Gottschall, Why fiction is good for you, The Boston Globe

[east-of-everything]

Great art, it seems, may prompt perturbations in the usually stable structure of personality.

Keith Oatley, In the Minds of Others

[nineohtoo]

Your Brain on Fiction:

Keith Oatley, an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that “runs on minds of readers just as computer simulations run on computers.” Fiction — with its redolent details, imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions — offers an especially rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other people’s thoughts and feelings.

[bkshelvesofdoom]

It looked as if reading fiction increased empathy and social understanding, not that socially skilled people read more fiction. Raymond Mar and two other colleagues also did a study on preschool children, and found that the more stories the children had read to them, and the more movies they watched, the better was their understanding of others. Watching television had no such effect.

Keith Oatley