Before I said goodbye to Raymond, I asked him why he had spent so much timy studying the effects of reading fiction on human consciousness. Up to the moment when I asked this, he had been something of a data geek, explaining methods in great detail. But as he answered his face opened up. 'We're all on the same ball of mud and water that is heading towards a catastrophic end potentially. If we aregoing to solve these problems, we can't do it alone,' he said. 'That's why I think empathy is so vlauable.'

— Stolen Focus von Johann Hari