Your brain on fiction, courtesy of The New York Times.

{some of my overflow stacks}

Stories. They're good for you!  Read this.  Some bits:


"Stories, this research is showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life."
"The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters."