Reading is one of the most healthy hobbies one can ever possess. Some read motivational books, some biographies, others stories. While the former genres help people in excelling the practical life, it is the latter which designs the integrity of thoughts, the way people think, the morals and ethics are the typical bi-products of reading good stories.

Researchers from the University of Southern California (USC) in the US believe that this may result in people feeling greater empathy for each other, regardless of a persons origin or language, added that it helps in activating the patterns of the brain when people find meaning in stories.

A functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is used in determining the scientists mapped brain responses to narratives in three different languages – English, Persian and Mandarin Chinese. The study, published in the journal Human Brain Mapping, opens up the possibility that exposure to narrative storytelling can have a widespread effect on triggering better self-awareness and empathy for others.

Morteza Dehghani, a researcher at the Brain and Creativity Institute at USC has said, “Even given these fundamental differences in language, which can be read in a different direction or contain a completely different alphabet altogether, there is something universal about what occurs in the brain at the point when we are processing narratives.”

In the process of finding the details, the researchers sorted through more than 20 million blog posts of personal stories using a software. The posts were narrowed down to 40 stories about personal topics such as divorce or telling a lie. Later, they were then translated into Mandarin Chinese and Persian, and read by a total of 90 American, Chinese and Iranian participants in their native language while their brains were scanned by MRI.

As a part of this contest, people also answered general questions about the stories while being scanned. Using state-of-the-art machine learning and techniques, and an analysis involving over 44 billion classifications, the researchers were able to “reverse engineer” the data from these brain scans to determine the story the reader was processing in each of the three languages mentioned above.

With these factors and equipment, the neuroscientists were able to read the participants minds as they were reading. In the case of each language, reading each story resulted in unique patterns of activations in the “default mode network” of the brain, this network engages interconnected brain regions such as the medial prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex, the inferior parietal lobe, the lateral temporal cortex and hippocampal formation, said the publication.

On a brief note, the research papers read that the default mode network was originally thought to be a sort of autopilot for the brain when it was at rest and shown only to be active when someone is not engaged in externally directed thinking which happens when we read books.

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