Nick Buttrick in The Washington Post: Books are good for your brain. But fiction has a surprising added benefit.

Portrait of Nick Buttrick — Nick Buttrick, assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, is pictured in a studio portrait on Nov. 25, 2024. (Photo by Althea Dotzour / UW–Madison)

Curling up with a good book isn’t just enjoyable. It’s also good for your brain.

Reading in general — newspapers, magazines, nonfiction books — has been linked to slower rates of cognitive decline in older adults and even longer lives.

But reading fiction may have unique benefits. For example, the amount of fiction people read seems to be a better predictor of language ability than nonfiction, research finds. And, perhaps even more importantly, research has found that fiction is linked to better social cognition — our ability to think about and interact with other people — and an increased understanding of the world as a complex place.

Why? Fiction forces you to imagine a story’s world and characters. It makes you grapple with different perspectives, mentally inhabiting distinct points of view, according to Nick Buttrick, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.