Reading books is the best brain workout

If I came and told you there is this one thing you could all do which would make you more imaginative, make your memory better, probably improve your personal relationships, and make you a nicer person, you would probably be very skeptical. And even more so if I said it costs nothing and probably everybody in this room can already do it. Now, you will probably have guessed by now that I’m talking about reading – there’s a clue in the title. But I’m not talking about the sort of reading that we all know is incredibly important; that is, the sort of reading we do for education, the sort of reading we do for administration, the sort of reading which we have to do nowadays just to get through life.

I’m talking rather about fiction, stories, narratives -the sort of reading where you are reading things from inside another person’s head, where it takes you right inside the character’s emotions and feelings and actions so you are seeing it from their perspective.

That’s the sort of reading which is at best thought of as pleasurable and at worst quite often as a waste of time.
I mean, I remember my sister telling me that when she was a child she was crazy about books but that her teacher once ripped a novel out of her hands, saying that ‘If you have to read, at least read something useful. ‘What I want to tell you today is that, surprisingly, fiction is very useful indeed, in ways that we probably never previously suspected; in fact, it’s more important, probably, than any other form of reading. And I have some evidence, which I’ll come to.

Now, I just want to show you quickly the difference between speaking and reading because they are very different. Speaking is something that, again, is in our genes, we already have those pathways wired into us when we are born. All you have to do is put a baby around people who are talking and sooner or later they will start to do it too, it’s natural. But reading is not. You could put a baby in a library, surrounded by books, from the day it’s born, and it would never start spontaneously reading. It has to be taught how to do it.

And this is the reason speech has been with us for at least 100,000 years, quite time for natural selection to actually get it wired into our brains. But reading probably only started about 5,000 years ago, and until about 100 years ago, most people didn’t do it at all. So rather than being able to use those pre-wired, intuitive, if you like, pathways, every time, every person who learns to read has to do it afresh. And that means making new pathways, individual pathways, the sort that individuals do make all through their life. Every time they have an experience will lay down a memory or a new habit; they create individual pathways, on top of the basic blueprint. And that’s what we have to do when we read.

These are really complicated networks that are being formed in the brain when we read. So your brain is doing a lot more work, it’s connecting far more parts. If you like, it’s a more holistic experience. It forces you to use parts of the brain that aren’t usually used. More than that, the reason, or one reason why it’s so widespread, is that when we read things about somebody doing something, run for their life or they’re screaming or they’re frightened, what happens in the brain of the reader is that those same bits of the brain that would be active if they were doing it themselves, become active.

Admittedly not quite to the same extent, or we’d act out everything we read, and we can usually inhibit them enough not to do that.

Now, this is the new information which has really only come out recently. Some researchers from Emory University in the States decided to see if they could actually see inside the brain what was going on. And this researchers set out to see if this was something that could actually be seen inside of the brain, physically. So they had students, lots and lots, I think it was quite a large sample, reading a passage of a particularly engaging and exciting novel with a lot of inside-character driven stuff.

And they had the people read just 30 pages a night for five nights in a row. And they took brain scans before the people started doing this exercise to get a baseline of what their brains looked like before. Then they had them read, and every night after they had read a passage, they came in next morning and they had their brain scanned again. And every day there were differences. The differences, this is a sort of schematic picture of where the differences where found, the connections, which as the week went on and they read a passage each night, they got thicker and denser .And they are, as you see, all over the brain, not just in the language areas, everywhere.

Basically, what these people seemed to be doing was giving themselves a really good workout. In fact, the brain scans looked more or less what you’d expect to find if this people had lived the events that they had been reading about. They had actually lived an experience, and it had become part of the architecture of their brain.

So in conclusion, your brain needs a workout as much as your body. And reading fiction seems to be one of the best workouts you can get. And not only is it good for you, but it’s also good for society as a whole because the brain is like a muscle: the more you force yourself through books to take other people’s perspectives, to sympathize, to empathize with other people, the more empathetic a society we will have.

Psst : The writer Gaurav Vasishta is a teacher at Leapwaters, which is an online learning platform that teaches future skills . All Skill Camps are taught in live online classes . They teach Communication Skills too . Check out at www.leapwaters.com