Reading Won't Make You Smarter

- ...but it might make you more human.

I’ve always loved reading. But I used to think of fiction as a luxury. Something indulgent, even a bit self-serving.

If I wanted to learn something useful, I reached for nonfiction. A biography. A business book. Something I could underline. Something that could teach me useful shit.

That changed when I read Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine.

It’s the story of a woman who, on the surface, couldn’t be more different from me. She’s awkward. Isolated. Misunderstood by almost everyone she meets.

And yet, by the end of the book, I found myself deeply invested in how she saw the world. Her private logic, her pain, her survival. It did something nonfiction rarely does. It made me feel my way into someone else’s experience.

It stretched me. Not intellectually, but emotionally.

And I’ve come to believe that fiction does something most nonfiction can’t: it trains empathy.

It doesn’t just inform, it has the power to transform.

Why Fiction Matters More Now Than Ever

Reading fiction is like going to the empathy gym.

Each story is a set of reps. Each character, a chance to build the emotional muscle it takes to see through someone else’s eyes. You spend time inside minds that are not your own. People you might judge, dismiss, or never even notice in real life. And over time, that starts to affect how you see people.

In an age where so much interaction is digital, abbreviated, or automated, that skill, the ability to emotionally inhabit someone else’s perspective, is quietly becoming a superpower.

Especially in the age of AI.

We’re surrounded by systems that can summarise, predict, and even generate. They can finish our sentences. But they can’t feel. They don’t know what it’s like to be heartbroken, lonely, misunderstood, or amazed. They can simulate conversation.

They can’t simulate compassion.

And while human connection is getting easier to fake, it’s becoming harder to find.

Fiction helps you keep that part of yourself alive. The part that sees beyond the immediate. The part that’s willing to be uncomfortable. The part that slows down and really listens. The part that wants to understand.

The Neuroscience of Feeling Fiction

There’s data behind all this too.

Studies from psychologists like Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar have shown that reading literary fiction improves what’s known as theory of mind. Our capacity to attribute thoughts, emotions, and intentions to others. One study even found that just a few minutes spent reading fiction enhanced participants’ ability to read emotional cues in other people.

Literary fiction that demands attention to character depth, moral ambiguity, and subtle social dynamics activates the same brain regions involved in real-life social cognition.

In other words, your brain doesn’t fully distinguish between experiencing a character’s emotional journey and living one of your own.

So when you cry over a character’s loss, or feel nervous when they’re in danger, or find yourself frustrated by their bad decisions, it’s not “just a story.” It’s your emotional circuitry doing reps.

Fiction vs. Nonfiction: A False Divide?

This isn’t about putting fiction on a pedestal or dismissing nonfiction. But I think we’ve drawn the wrong battle lines.

We often talk about nonfiction as the serious genre. The educational one. The domain of insight and self-improvement. Fiction is relegated to entertainment. Escapism.

But if you think of nonfiction as sharpening your understanding of the world, then fiction sharpens your understanding of people. And you can’t separate the two.

If anything, we could use a bit more "fiction-thinking" in our lives.

Think about how much of your daily work, especially in leadership or decision-making, relies on navigating ambiguity. Understanding motivation. Reading between the lines. Adapting to emotional undercurrents.

These are not skills you get from bullet points or case studies. They come from intuition. From being able to follow the arc of someone’s inner life.

Fiction doesn’t just teach you what to know. It trains you how to notice.

Side note: The Stranger on the Train

A few weeks ago, I sat across from a man on the tube who kept muttering angrily to himself. He looked rough, his coat torn, hands dirty. I felt myself tensing. Doing that internal calculation of “just don’t make eye contact.”

Then a line from Jesus’ Son flashed into my mind: “I knew every raindrop by its name.” It’s from a character who’s broken, addicted, and drifting, but there’s a kind of poetry in how he sees the world. A deep, chaotic beauty.

I looked back at the man, and for a second, I stopped seeing a threat and started seeing a story. I didn’t speak to him (I'm a Londoner, we don't do that). But I didn’t flinch either. Fiction didn’t make me a better person. But in that moment, it gave me a different lens.

Two Books That Do the Work

If you’re looking to stretch that muscle in 2026 , then start with these.

Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman: A quiet, sharp, unexpectedly moving novel about isolation, social awkwardness, and resilience. It offers an unfiltered view into a mind shaped by trauma, but it never asks for your pity, only your attention.

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson: It’s not a linear read. But Johnson’s writing hits like electricity. His characters are often lost, high, broken and yet somehow luminous. You don’t just read these stories. You hallucinate your way through them. And you come out the other side changed.

They’re very different books. One is carefully structured and emotionally precise. The other is chaotic and poetic. But they both offer a kind of emotional calibration most nonfiction can’t.

Empathy as Practice, Not Trait

It’s tempting to think of empathy as a fixed trait. Some people have it. Others don’t.

But empathy is more like fitness. You can train it. You can lose it. You can build it back.

And fiction is one of the best training tools we have.

It’s private. It’s quiet. And it’s slow. Which is precisely why it works. It doesn’t demand a performance. It just asks you to sit with someone else’s truth, for a while. To see the world the way they do, even if, especially if, you disagree.

That might be the most radical thing you can do in a world built for speed and certainty.

So if you’ve drifted away from fiction, or never really got into it, maybe now’s the time to try again. Not because it’ll make you more productive. But because it might make you more you.

Let me know what fiction has done for you. And if you’ve got a book that punched a hole in your worldview, I want to hear about it.

Until next time,

Jon "Bookworm" Kaye

Choosing to live more deliberately

P.S.

Every hour on Do Radio, we ask our guests for a book that changed their lives. After 20 weeks on the air, I now have a book list of 160 amazing books to read! Just another reason to tune in. Listen here.