Why reading fiction is different

There is something to be said about reading fiction—it is fundamentally different from watching TV, movies, Netflix, or scrolling through Twitter and TikTok. When you read, your mind has to make a leap. You convert words—abstract symbols—into images, sensations, and meaning. It is one of the most complex mental operations we’re capable of, and it doesn’t happen passively. You have to train for it. Reading fiction, especially the literary kind, is not effortless consumption; it is deliberate imagination.¹

And it changes you. After reading, you’re left in a different state than after watching something. Streaming content may numb you just enough to pass the time, but fiction leaves a residue—something richer, more alive, more interior. It lingers. A novel doesn’t just tell a story; it folds you into its world, its way of thinking, even its rhythm.

Neuroscience backs this up. A study from Emory University (Berns et al., 2013) found that reading novels boosts connectivity in regions of the brain involved in language and sensory integration. These effects lasted well beyond the act of reading itself. You’re not just absorbing a narrative—you’re rehearsing it in your body.

And there’s more. A now-famous study by Kidd and Castano (2013) showed that reading literary fiction improves theory of mind—the ability to attribute mental states to others. In other words, it sharpens empathy. The same effect did not occur when participants read non-fiction or genre fiction, or when they didn’t read at all. Reading good fiction, the kind that resists easy answers, exercises our capacity for subtlety and ambiguity.

This is why screen fiction, for all its virtues, is not quite the same. Someone else has already done the hard work: imagined the characters, designed the setting, timed the emotional beats. You’re not building; you’re receiving. It’s not bad—no more than dining at a restaurant is bad. But do it every day, and the experience flattens. Cook for yourself, and you rediscover the joy of choice, the small epiphanies of flavor. Reading fiction is like that: more demanding, yes, but infinitely more nourishing.

So I remind myself—especially on nights when my fingers drift toward the remote or the endless scroll—that the novel waiting on my nightstand isn’t just a better story. It’s a better state of mind.