Fiction is good for you!

Finally, I can read my novels and maybe even my guilty pleasure novels knowing that they are making me smarter.

"For the first time in history there is now scientific evidence that reading fiction has psychological benefits" writes Keith Oatley in New Scientist. Oatley is a professor of psychology and the leader of a Toronto Team of researchers at the University of Toronto. He is also the award winning novelist (The Case of Emily V.). On the phone from the University of Toronto, he explains that reading fiction appears to stimulate parts of the brain that govern empathy. "What you're doing when you're reading fiction is you're allowing yourself to become another person for a short period of time.... It loosens up your personality, your rigidities."

Oatley freely admitted to many questions that his findings do not resolve. Will a short story by Chekhov produce the same result as a Tom Clancy airport thriller? In which is one more likely to gather knowledge about people; a pop novel or a literary memoir?

Oatley concedes that it's possible his research applies, if not exclusively than at least especially to good fiction. But what is good fiction? Guess that guilty pleasure might not help me after all.