I remember I once saw a young woman across a busy bar while waiting to order a drink, soon after the birth of my first daughter, Anna. I caught myself noticing that this woman had a plain face with an awkwardly shaped nose and then I saw her again as her father might have. I imagined how he must feel when he picks her out in a crowd or when she comes through the front door, and my sense of her changed completely. I was no longer making a detached aesthetic judgement; I was briefly involved in a particular life with an imagined, loving history.

However, perspective-changing experiences, like having my first child, come in relatively short supply. This is where good novels can help. The Canadian psychologist Keith Oatley has devoted his life to the psychology of fiction. One of his classic studies involved giving subjects two versions of Chekhov's short story “The Lady with the Little Dog” (Djikic et al. forthcoming). The first was the story as Chekov wrote it and the second was a rewrite of the story as a non-fictional transcript from a divorce court. The second version was the same length and presented the same level of reading difficulty as the first, and the subjects' personality traits and emotions were assessed before and after reading each version.