From a movie, with empathy.

Can watching videos teach us how to empathize? Better than reading?

Has it really been so long since I wrote my last post? February seems like a lifetime ago but that’s hardly surprising considering each day presents itself as an age since yesterday.

I heard on the radio that schools are introducing empathy classes. Empathy can be thought at school, gushes the BBC quoting a study by the University of Cambridge.

One term of empathy lessons in schools could lead to positive changes in behaviour, a study supported by the University of Cambridge has suggested.

About 900 pupils aged between five and 18 in six countries completed a video course and engaged in discussions about it afterwards.

Empathy – the ability to understand and share the feelings of others – is largely considered to be something we develop through childhood and our life experiences.

Pupils were rated by teachers on empathy, behaviour and other characteristics on a scale of 1-10 before the programme began, and again five and 10 weeks later, with the average empathy score rising from 5.55 to 7 during that period.

Their behaviour scores also increased, from 6.52 to 7.89.

I have lots of questions but mostly I want to know if this measured affect was permanent? How long did it last? Were the pupils rated again after 6 months? What about two years? And if storytelling videos work so well, why hasn’t a generation of children raised on Teletubbies, Barney, Ben and Holly, Bob the Builder, already internalized it?

At the risk of sounding like a ‘when I was your age …’ fuddy duddy, I’d like to suggest that what we’re trying to do with storytelling videos, is what reading once did. And according to the Science, better.

Reading lights up our brains in a way that watching a film simply cannot.

When we read, we become one with the characters. We feel what they feel, we live their lives to the extent that it is shared with us and even when it isn’t, in a well-written story we fill in the gaps ourselves.

When we read, our brains go into hyperactive mode helping us imagine the worlds, people, feelings and events we are reading about. When we watch a movie, our brains needn’t imagine much. It’s all been done according to someone else’s imagination. Keep that up and we’ll lose the ability to imagine altogether. Considering the onslaught of Hollywood sequels and prequels and rehashes and subhashes of plots and characters well past their prime, the wells of imagination are already running dry - in some parts of the world.

Look at the world of independent films, especially those from countries where to call someone well-read is to bestow the ultimate compliment, and the cup of imagination overflows.

Books, I insist to every child within earshot, or these days textshot, exercises our minds in ways watching films cannot.

Reading a book simply uses a very large number of brain areas and watching a film relatively few: you have to visualize the scenes in your head, work out how the narrative is unfolding across space and time, turn little bits of lines and half formed curves and circles into words and sentences, and use complex language skills to understand the plot and dialogue.

In a different article, in another time, the BBC wrote

We can empathise with people we see in news stories too, and hopefully we often do. But fiction has at least three advantages. We have access to the character’s interior world in a way we normally do not with journalism, and we are more likely to willingly suspend disbelief without questioning the veracity of what people are saying. Finally, novels allow us to do something that is hard to do in our own lives, which is to view a character’s life over many years.

And a final word by Dr Sebastian, University of York:

In order to produce images in the brain or mind, we rely on a number of sensory systems, and not just our ability to see.  It takes the experiences of sight, hearing, smell, taste and touch to produce a response to the world around us, and our study in children suggests that passively consuming images for hours and over a long period of time, without routinely stopping to do something else that tests our other sensory functions, or to simply pause their viewing to discuss what they had just seen on the television, dulls the imaginative capabilities.

In our study with adults, we see a similar effect in a short period of time, and by comparing it to reading we can see that the brain needs to actively create mental imagery, and we appear to be able to do this better when the images have not already been given to us via film clips.

It is thought that imagination plays an important role in human development and can impact many abilities, such as how to plan, be creative, and empathise. 

“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies . . . The man who never reads lives only one.” George R. R. Martin

Lovely quotes about reading.