Reading books to read minds

I was listening to NPR a week or so ago and I heard a Story of the Day podcast that was about the study that found that reading literature makes you more socially adept by enhancing your ability to perceive the thoughts and feelings of people around you. I thought immediately of The Sun Also Rises.

The study compared what they called popular fiction novels, books with predictable plots and common tropes, and literary fiction which tends to be more focused on complex character development and hidden meanings. Many times, readers have to infer what's going on in literary novels. 

The scientists found that the people who read literary fiction did better on tests of mind reading, and the group who read popular fiction did about as well as people who hadn't read anything at all. The explanation for this was that reading books is like immersing yourself in a new world of social interaction, and that even though it is a fictional one you still go through some of the same analysis and thinking when reading literary fiction that you do when interacting in real life.

I think Ernest Hemingway is a good example of this kind of literary fiction that makes you think critically about human interaction. The Sun Also Rises is a great example of a book that requires much inference to be fully understood.  The iceberg effect that Hemingway uses means that you almost have to read the book twice to get all the references and small details that are important to how the story unfolds.

The Sun Also Rises is a book that revolves completely around social interaction with ironic subtext that the reader has to decipher.  Jake's narration gives more background understanding and also interprets the conversations that he has with the people around him. One good example of this is all of the meaning behind Jake's last words of the novel: "Yes, isn't it pretty to think so?". Throughout the entire book, the reader has to interpret Jake's narration to figure out how exactly his judgements and biases influence the story. 

Perhaps this was one of the reasons why I didn't like the book very much when we first began reading. I didn't pick up on all of the small details, and I couldn't understand how a story like this would be interesting. It seemed to have little plot aside from various relationship conflicts and drinking at bars. After all the class discussions, though, the book became more interesting as we made connections and inferred what was going on in the story.

I personally think that it's cool to think that after reading literary fiction we're better at mind reading. It almost makes me want to go out and read a bunch of literary fiction just so that I can be a mind reader and (if I may reference Mrs. Dalloway just once more) be able to know people by instinct like Clarissa Dalloway felt she could.