We may as well just open oxytocin bars instead of libraries...

So it is quite common that people asking me about "Why libraries?" are really asking me to tell them a story about how someone read a book and it made them a better person.  Of course, they are happy with an anecdote, but the social scientist in me hesitates to generalize from anecdotes, and I know that many many kids do not become better persons no matter how many Narnia books they read (or the non-existent as far as I know African equivalent, but I am waiting for Akpan to get some hope and have some fun and write a fantasy novel for kids and grownups set in Africa... The Famished Road, you suggest... are you kidding?).  Anyway, the social scientist in me hesitates to ascribe much definitive good to book reading, and now I hesitate even more, because much recent science is saying we may as well just open oxytocin bars instead of libraries... Of course, continuing my thought, what if they took the oxytocin double-shot and then read a really bad book? 

 Deric Bownds' MindBlog reproduces an abstract from  from Hurlemann et al.:

Oxytocin (OT) is becoming increasingly established as a prosocial neuropeptide in humans with therapeutic potential in treatment of social, cognitive, and mood disorders. However, the potential of OT as a general facilitator of human learning and empathy is unclear. The current double-blind experiments on healthy adult male volunteers investigated first whether treatment with intranasal OT enhanced learning performance on a feedback-guided item-category association task where either social (smiling and angry faces) or nonsocial (green and red lights) reinforcers were used, and second whether it increased either cognitive or emotional empathy measured by the Multifaceted Empathy Test. Further experiments investigated whether OT-sensitive behavioral components required a normal functional amygdala. Results in control groups showed that learning performance was improved when social rather than nonsocial reinforcement was used. Intranasal OT potentiated this social reinforcement advantage and greatly increased emotional, but not cognitive, empathy in response to both positive and negative valence stimuli. Interestingly, after OT treatment, emotional empathy responses in men were raised to levels similar to those found in untreated women. Two patients with selective bilateral damage to the amygdala (monozygotic twins with congenital Urbach-Wiethe disease) were impaired on both OT-sensitive aspects of these learning and empathy tasks, but performed normally on nonsocially reinforced learning and cognitive empathy. Overall these findings provide the first demonstration that OT can facilitate amygdala-dependent, socially reinforced learning and emotional empathy in men.