Time spent with a book has long been linked to cognitive health. Newspapers, magazines and non-fiction all count, and older adults who spend time with any of them show slower rates of cognitive decline. Some research has connected the habit to longer lives as well.

Fiction, though, appears to do something extra. The amount of fiction a person gets through is a better predictor of their language ability than the amount of non-fiction, which is not the result most people would guess. Fiction has also been linked to stronger social cognition, meaning the ability to think about other people and deal with them well, and to a broader sense of the world as a complicated place.

Raymond Mar, a professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, recently pulled the evidence together in a review of what narrative fiction does for us. His summary is that novels give us better insight into our own experience and into the experience of people very different from us, and that the habit tends to produce reflection and contemplation.

Some of the clearest findings come from young children. Measurement is easier at that age, because one particular ability arrives on a fairly predictable schedule and can be tested directly.

Between the ages of four and six, children develop what psychologists call a theory of mind. It is the understanding that other people hold beliefs, feelings and points of view that are not the same as your own. Every social skill a person will later use is built on top of it.

Children who are given more storybooks reach that milestone sooner than children given fewer, Mar says. A 2025 meta-analysis pooling 21 separate studies found that children who spend more time with storybooks also show more empathy.

The relationship appears to work in both directions. A 2024 study of more than 900 children found that better reading comprehension predicted higher empathy later on, and that higher empathy predicted better reading ability. A 2023 study found that adolescents who read more for pleasure became more sociable adults.

Neuroimaging offers a possible explanation, and it is simpler than it sounds. Nothing in the brain evolved to handle novels, so whatever fiction draws on must already have been sitting there for some other purpose.

Brain scans show that the networks we use to follow a story overlap heavily with the networks behind theory of mind. In Mar’s phrase, engaging with a story pulls up the same equipment we use to understand actual human beings. Fiction, on this account, is a detailed cognitive and emotional simulation of social life, run at no risk.

Nick Buttrick, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, points to something written stories demand that screens do not. Television and film may deliver some of the same benefits, but a book makes you build the world yourself. The setting is not handed over. You have to imagine it, and that extra effort may be part of why the effect shows up.

There is also a plainer comfort in it. Even when friends are unavailable, as Mar puts it, a book can always be opened.

Solitary as the activity appears, it feeds directly into social health. Part of that may come from what happens once the book is closed.

Book clubs, shared reading groups and online reading communities such as Bookstagram add a further layer. Talking about a book with somebody else means you are not only imagining the characters yourself, but also taking in how another person responded to exactly the same material. Buttrick describes that as a second round of the same cognitive work.

The other thing fiction supplies is exposure to difference. Good writers are close observers of people, and a novel can put a reader inside experiences well outside their own life. Buttrick calls it an encounter with a different mind, a different place and a different approach to the world, and he thinks the most interesting reading is where that difference is sharpest.

His own research supports it. In a 2022 study of more than 5,000 people, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Buttrick and colleagues found that people who grew up with more literary fiction were more likely to become adults with complex worldviews, marked by nuance, psychological richness and intellectual humility.

Where The Evidence Is Careful

None of this is as settled as a headline might suggest, and the researchers are open about the difficulty. Almost everything above is a correlation rather than proof of cause.

Studying the effects of a habit is hard because the habit is part of a whole life. As Buttrick notes, people who have more time, more space and more inclination to pick up a book are not doing so at random. Something else about their circumstances may be producing the results.

Money is part of that something else. Socioeconomic status is a strong predictor of both how much a person gets through and how well. One 2025 study of more than 14,000 students complicates the picture in a useful way, finding that leisure reading delivered its largest benefits to children whose parents had less education. Whatever the habit does, it also appears to do it across years rather than weeks.

The practical advice from both researchers is unglamorous, which is probably a good sign. Neither suggests a target, a tracker or a number of books per year.

Start small and take the time from your phone. Mar suggests swapping screen time before bed for a book, beginning with fifteen minutes and working up gradually towards half an hour, then longer.

Consistency matters more than ambition. No single book changes a life, Buttrick says. The effect comes from the accumulation, from going back again and again over years.

Form matters less than people assume. Short stories count, so do graphic novels and fan fiction. Audiobooks count too, and Buttrick argues that certain difficult works are actually easier to follow when heard aloud.

Above all, neither researcher thinks any of this should feel like homework. Reading is not a monastic discipline performed alone at night for self-improvement. Lean towards whatever you enjoy, make it social where you can, and as Mar puts it, there is nothing to be embarrassed about in whatever you happen to be reading.