Liam Durcan parses the benefits of reading fiction in the weekend Globe. An additional benefit to reading fiction, for me at least, is that it means I’m not reading CNN and thrashing about in an silent existential scream of dispair at the state of the world. Unless I’m reading Beckett.

Long after the words of a fictional passage are forgotten, the experience is remembered. We remember Herzog’s anger and disillusionment, Pi Patel’s fear and Molly Bloom’s throes. The words have become the experience and, in a way, the character’s experience has become our experience. We have lived it too.

How does this happen? In her outstanding book Why We Read Fiction, literary theorist Lisa Zunshine relates the act of reading fiction to our ability and desire to understand the minds of others. Developmental psychologists refer to this ability as “theory of mind,” a capacity most of us develop in early childhood. It is essentially an understanding that other beings have intentions and mental states apart from our own, and it is a short jump from this to attributing mental states to others (the evolutionary importance of being able to attribute mental states, and from there to possibly predict the behaviour of others, is obvious).