Why Reading Fiction Matters: General Knowledge

Read up, sunshine

When I read more, I feel smarter.

Recently, Netflix was accused of dumbing-down content to keep second-screen viewers happy — that’s people ‘watching’ while multitasking on their phones. The big red N reportedly instructs its writers to simplify plots and have on-screen characters verbally describe what is going on so non-concentrating viewers can keep up.

I’ll admit that’s not an entirely new phenomenon. At university, we had a joke that whenever the plot was explained in plain terms by a movie character, it was ‘for the American audience’. Apologies, Americans — I’m much more mature nowadays.

So it was somewhat humbling to realise that I, too, have been entertaining this form of ‘brain rot’¹, bizarrely enough while watching BBC’s University Challenge — a programme which, let’s face it, demands your attention if you want to vaguely succeed at guessing just one esoteric question correct before the Imperial College boffins buzz in.

Brain rot or not, my experience is the more I read in a given season, the more easily I can access information that I’ve previously learned. It’s as though reading awakens the grey matter.

Well-read

If someone has broad generally knowledge, they might be described as ‘well-read’.

CEOs and business leaders often tout the value of reading. For some it’s a badge of honour — for example here’s Warren Buffett trying to put you off reading:

“Read 500 pages like this every day. That’s how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it.”

There you have it — if you read lots, you too could become a billionaire. Perhaps you can visualise the dollars falling into your bank account as each of the words in this article compound in your mind? You’re welcome...

---

The decision to read a book for self-improvement rather than for pleasure is sometimes called “reading up”², and it’s big business today. Every airport lounge is full of books that promise to change your life.

I sometimes annoy my friends by pointing out just how many self-help books they have on their shelves. In the old days, having this sort of library might be considered gauche and unsophisticated, but, of course, as I take a quick scan at the books near my desk: Outliers (Malcolm Gladwell), Deep Work (Cal Newport), Indistractable (Nir Eyal) — it’s clear I’ve fallen into the same trap.

This tells me that we believe books contain power. And while non-fiction evidently contains more ‘information’ to be directly assimilated, I also believe reading fiction can teach us much general and world knowledge. Sometimes it’s inferred, sometimes philosophical. But unlike non-fiction, it usually isn’t possible to receive this information in bullet points.

Reading is one of the core ways that we develop knowledge. Reading can impart knowledge to us by transmission (you read a fact) or generatively (you read a funny story, learning as you do so that the author writes humour). The generative learning experience is more complicated than transmissive learning: you infer, deduct, and piece together the puzzle that eventually turns into knowledge.

Summer Reading Loss

To wrap up, I want to quickly look at the effect of children not reading.

‘Summer Reading Loss’ is a theory that explains the gap in education that develops between children from low and high-income households over the summer holidays. During school term, reading attainment develops for both groups at a similar rate, but during the holidays, children from high-income families on average continue improving and low-income children stop improving.

When they return to school, a gap in reading ability begins to become evident that will, year after year, increase if unchecked. By the time these children are ready to leave secondary education, the gap is understood to be the equivalent of three years of education.

That’s three years of additional education acquired simply by reading in the summer break.

Or, put another way: that’s three years of learning lost by those who don’t read during their summers. I’ll be looking more at this and the benefits of reading to social mobility in a couple of days.

So, does reading make people smarter?

If "smarter" means having a larger vocabulary and more world knowledge in addition to the abstract reasoning skills encompassed within the concept of intelligence, as it does in most laymen's definitions of intelligence, then reading may well make people smarter.³

Let’s just call that a yes, shall we?

1. Brain rot (n.) Supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as a result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterised as likely to lead to such deterioration. (Oxford Word of the Year 2024)

2. Reading Up: Middle-Class Readers and the Culture of Success in the Early Twentieth-Century United States - Amy L. Blair

3. Stanovich KE. Does reading make you smarter? Literacy and the development of verbal intelligence. Adv Child Dev Behav. 1993;24:133-80. doi: 10.1016/s0065-2407(08)60302-x. PMID: 8447247.