It's not just magic: How Harry Potter is good for our health

By Kristen Amiet|

Village Roadshow

Muggles still clinging to hopes of receiving a letter from Hogwarts will be pleased to know that J.K. Rowling's wildly successful series actually has some magical real-world applications.

As the best-selling book series of all time, Harry Potter was bound to be met by criticisms from grumpy goblins and broody Boggarts: some Christian groups have suggested the series promotes paganism and witchcraft to impressionable kiddies, while other critics suggested that adults' love for The Boy Who Lived is "a bad case of cultural infantilism".


Read on to find out how Harry Potter is good for your health.

It makes you less prejudiced to mudbloods minorities

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In 2014, Italian researchers found that children and adolescents who studied Harry Potter over a six-week period were less prejudiced toward immigrants and homosexuals, and more tolerant of social minority groups overall.

With an aim to determine whether or not their real-world attitudes were affected by the books' content, the course was followed up by a questionnaire that established participants' attitudes toward those social groups.

They found that kids who identified with the lead character (pretty much all of them) were less biased towards stigmatised minority groups and were open-minded about immigrant and LGBT communities in a real-world context.

"Reading the novels can potentially tackle actual prejudice reduction," said lead author Loris Vezzali.

Harry's solidarity with the much-maligned "mudbloods", for example, helped children to understand the importance of tolerance and acceptance in a social setting.

How charming: It keeps our kids safe

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When the Pottermania craze hit its peak in the mid-'00s, a team specialists at John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford noted something interesting: at the same time children were "petrified" on the sofa reading the latest instalment in Harry's adventures, the trauma unit was all but deserted.

"Given the lack of horizontal velocity, height, wheels, or sharp edges associated with this particular craze, we were interested to investigate the impact the Harry Potter books had on children's traumatic injuries during the peak of their use," they wrote.

Eric Wortman/The British Medical Journal

While poor old Harry was exposed to plenty of violent crime and life-threatening injuries in the books, it seems those same books significantly decreased the number of accident-prone muggle children presenting to emergency rooms in the UK. It was as if they'd taken a dose of liquid luck while reading the books: the researchers found that the number of injured kiddies dropped by half on summer weekends following the release of new Harry Potter instalments.

Hold the Skele-gro, Madam Pomfrey.

Yer a wizard, Harry! It makes our kids more creative

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In what was the first attempt to observe the effects of exposing children to imaginative content like Santa Claus, the tooth fairy and even the wizarding world of Harry Potter, researchers from Lancaster University found that pre-schoolers who watched the Potter movies displayed enhanced imagination and creativity.

Researchers Dr Eugene Subbotsky, Claire Hysted and Nicola Jones from the Department of Psychology at Lancaster University concluded that: "Magical thinking enables children to create fantastic imaginary worlds, and in this way enhances children's capacity to view the world and act upon it from multiple perspectives.


The Hogwarts handbook: It's an effective educational tool

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Scientists do some pretty cool stuff but, unfortunately, the significance of their work is often lost in a web of technical jargon that's misunderstood by the general public. In response to this, a bunch of science-y types have investigated how they can make the field more captivating.

"Fiction texts do not require background knowledge to be understood and enjoyed; they humanise science and scientific enquiry, and often create an emotional response in the viewer," said Australian National University student Caroline Faulder.

In her essay, Faulder points to the importance of constructivism — that is, an individual's ability to forge their own understanding of scientific facts by basing it on pre-existing perceptions and beliefs — in making science accessible to the masses. Enter Harry Potter: "Although Harry Potter is set in fantasy, the moral issues and obstacles the characters face reflect the issues people encounter in everyday life.

"In this way, Harry Potter's world mirrors our own, and therefore the moral values and issues portrayed in the literature are relevant to daily life."

There's still no word on when science will be delivering time turners, though.

Author: Kristen Amiet. Approving editor: Sam Downing.

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