Mar and his colleagues,including Oatley, conducted experiments that ultimately showed that people who read fiction aremore empathetic than those who do not. Mar and his colleagues argue that this is the case becausefiction offers the unique opportunity to identify with characters, something that fiction readers takewith them beyond the text and into real life situations

Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have longpreceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated forthem to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had alreadybegun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retracefor you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide thatyou have caught the tenor of the argument; then you put in your oar. Someone an-swers; you answer him; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself againstyou, to either the embarrassment or gratification of your opponent, depending uponthe quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hourgrows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorouslyin progress.

Reading mindfullymeans paying attention not just to the content of the text—what it says—but rather to the processof reading itself by adjusting how you read based on what the piece asks of you

You are not distracted or focused on anythingelse