Useless and Disinterested: How Literature Makes Us Better

Can reading literary fiction render you a more emotionally intelligent neuroscientist? Will assigning good stories in medical and bioethics classrooms cultivate a generation of more empathetic clinicians? For that matter, do encounters with great literature turn us into more ethical persons? If recent research on the science and psychology of stories is taken to its seemingly logical conclusion, then we can be hopeful about all of these potential outcomes.