The Benefits of Reading On Your Brain
Read.
To read.
Reading.
Read.
You know that feeling when you look at a word for a long time and all of a sudden it is like you have never seen the word before. It feels odd on your tongue, you cannot remember how to pronounce it properly and are almost entirely convinced you have been saying it wrong your entire life. That is exactly how I felt the other day while staring at the word ‘read’.
The Cambridge dictionary defines ‘read’, a verb, as the ability to look at words or symbols and understand what they mean. Additionally, the noun form, a ‘reading’ is stated to be the skill or activity of getting information. Inherent in reading is the act of gathering information and understanding. Seems obvious. Indeed, there is nothing particularly surprising in this definition. And yet, I was struck by how significant it was. For a self-proclaimed avid reader, it was almost uncanny at just how strange I found the word. As if I had never taken the time to properly look at it. Well, now I am.
It occurred to me that reading is not just a simple act of skimming shapes on a paper. To have even a minimal comprehension of what you are reading, your brain undertakes several functions all at once. Your synapsis a firing away making connections. In her bestselling book, Proust and the Squid, Dr, Maryanne Wolf emphasises just how novel (pun intended) the act of reading really is in the larger scheme of human history. Wolf argues that reading, much like writing, is a human invention, going on to say:
We were never born to read. No specific genes ever dictated reading’s development. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we changed the very organisation of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.
Seems I am not the only one who was struck by the significance of reading.
I will admit, a lot of this fascination is born from the nerdy side of me that at five years old desperately wished reading was considered as cool as playing football. But trust me, this stuff is incredibly cool. Here are some of the benefits of reading on your brain:
Reading is like a workout for your brain.
Dr. Ken Pugh of the Haskins Laboratory for the Science of the Spoken and Written Word states that ‘parts of the brain that have evolved for other functions–such as vision, language, and associative learning–connect in a specific neural circuit for reading, which is very challenging.’ Your brain has to transform its natural inclinations to be able to decode information. Essentially, reading does for your brain what exercise does for your body.
Improves concentration
Reading usually requires one to exercise huge amounts of concentration, which has become much harder to do for long periods of time in the age of the internet. The act of sitting down with a book and deliberately ignoring all distractions around you trains your brain to endure longer periods of concentration, a skill that is incredibly handy when you have been putting off writing a blog post (guilty!).
Improves neural connections in your brain
The fact that your brain has to use numerous functions at the same time acts as another kind of exercise for your brain in formulating thoughts faster and improving imagination. Moreover, research shows that reading can improve your ‘fluid intelligence’ which is the ability to solve problems, understand things and detect meaningful patterns.
Makes you more empathetic
Gregory Burns, the lead neuroscientist for a research at Emory University states that ‘the neural changes that we found associated with physical sensation and movement systems suggest that reading a novel can transport you into the body of the protagonist . . . We already knew that good stories can put you in someone else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something may also be happening biologically.’
If you have not figured out your New Year’s resolutions quite yet, or you have been toying with the idea of creating a reading goal this year, I hope these benefits have helped convince you.
~S~
