Benefits of reading books
The importance of reading is due to the fact that it develops thinking, enriches people with knowledge, and helps keep the mind active. From books you can glean a variety of information that cannot be found anywhere else. For many centuries, reading has remained the main form of leisure for many people, and even after the advent of radio, television and the Internet, books continue to be the most important source of information, and reading books is one of the most common ways to spend time. There are a number of reasons for this.
Increased life expectancy
Reading books prolongs life. According to recent studies, the life expectancy of people who are fond of reading is on average two to three years longer than those who do not read anything Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade, Becca R. Levy. A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity. . To live longer, you need to set aside about half an hour a day to read literature.
In order to improve the quality and length of your life, it is not at all necessary to do some extremely difficult things. It turns out that you just need to set aside a little time to read.
The main positive effects of reading books
By reading books, people not only have fun and learn new knowledge, but also receive many other benefits for their mental and physical well-being. At the moment, anyone can afford to read science fiction online or any other genre directly from the screen of any gadget. The popularity of applications for reading books online is growing every year.
The most important positive effects obtained from reading books include the following:
- Brain training. In addition to the pleasure people get from reading books, it activates the area of the brain that is responsible for concentration and critical analysis, and stimulates cognitive functions. Just as muscles grow larger and stronger with regular exercise, reading develops the areas of the brain that control thinking.
- Enrichment of vocabulary. While reading books, a person comes across words whose meaning he vaguely understands or does not understand at all. To find out their meaning, the reader turns to paper or electronic dictionaries. The learned words are gradually integrated into the person’s everyday vocabulary, and soon he begins to use them in life.
- Relief from tension and stress. Many people have experienced that reading is a great form of entertainment, but they may not realize that reading can also help reduce stress. This activity and concentration on the written word relieves the mind of worries and daily worries. While reading, a person is mentally transported to another world and relaxes. Since stress can significantly worsen health, reducing stress levels improves not only mental but also physical well-being.
- Reading helps fight depression. There are many self-help books that provide advice on how to improve your mental well-being. However, even without following these recommendations, reading itself stimulates the area of the brain responsible for overcoming depressive states. After reading funny stories, a feeling of happiness arises and your mood improves. Of course, this method does not allow you to get rid of all psychological problems, but it reduces the negative effect of prolonged depressive states, similar to the effect of an anesthetic drug on the body.
- Strengthening memory and attention. In the process of reading books, a person remembers their content. This stimulates the area of the brain responsible for memory management. To ensure this effect, a person must concentrate on the text of the book, otherwise he will not be able to remember even what is written on the previous page.
- Development of writing skills. Almost all famous writers are also avid readers. Reading other people's books helps them embrace different styles and artistic techniques, increasing their skill level.
- Improving sleep quality. Reading alone does not help a person fall asleep, but it does improve the quality of your night's rest. By reducing stress through reading, it helps you relax and fall into deep sleep. Setting aside a specific time for reading before going to bed can help ensure a restful night's rest, especially after a busy day's work. To do this, you don’t have to spend a long time reading a book, just read a few pages.
- Expanding your horizons. Books help you look at many things from a new point of view. For example, studying the traditions of a certain culture allows you to understand its differences from your own culture. A person may not agree with some of its manifestations, but he will still perceive them in a new way. In the absence of other points of view, people tend to think the same way, which is based on their upbringing. A person reacts and acts as he was taught in childhood. He looks at the world from the point of view of his individual experience and is fully confident that only his point of view is correct. Books help people see many things in a different light, abandoning the right/wrong dichotomy. Reading helps to significantly expand the horizons of your ideas about the world around you.
Increasing tolerance levels
Literary fiction, that is, fiction in poetry and prose, helps people to be more humane. It increases the level of empathy, making us more sensitive and receptive towards everyone around us.
Fiction simulates situations that can happen to people in real life. That is why it finds such a response among readers. When we read a work, we involuntarily pass through what is happening to the characters and begin to think about how we would behave in their place.
Fiction helps us expand our social reach and better understand people whose experiences differ from our own.
What is a work of fiction, be it a book, film, play or television series? This is a fragment of someone else's consciousness, which seems to be transmitted from one mind to another. Fiction enriches our social experience and helps us better understand others. When you read a book or watch some melodrama, it is as if you are living a hundred lives. This is breathtaking.
Keith Oatley
psychologist
In addition, fiction has a positive effect on the functioning of the brain and develops the imagination well, since writers often leave a certain amount of unsaid in stories so that the reader can figure it out on his own and think out everything at his own discretion.
Find yourself in the shoes of a hero
Mirror neurons are found in the temporal cortex and amygdala of the brain. It is thanks to them that people can repeat dance movements after each other, parody someone, or experience joy when looking at a smiling person. “From the point of view of biological feasibility, this is correct. It’s more effective when the pack, the community, has a single emotion: we all run away from danger together, fight a predator, celebrate holidays,” explains the importance of the mechanism, Doctor of Biological Sciences Vyacheslav Dubynin.
A study from Emory University proves that a person can experience empathy not only for a neighbor or passerby, but also for a character in a book. The reading participants underwent a series of MRI scans, which showed increased activity in the central sulcus of the brain. Neurons in this region can convert thoughts into actual sensations - for example, thoughts about future competitions into the feeling of physical exertion. And while reading, they literally put us in the shoes of our favorite hero.
“We don't know how long these neural changes might last. But the fact that the effects of even just reading a random story were detectable in the brain after 5 days suggests that your favorite books may have an effect on you for much longer,” says lead researcher on the project Gregory Burns.
Is it possible to read in the dark
The benefits and harms of reading books depend on the level of lighting. In the dark, you have to bring the book too close to your eyes, which can lead to the development of myopia.
In addition, research confirms that in semi-darkness a person is much less likely to feel the need to blink. The harmful property of reading in the dark is that constantly open eyes dry out quickly. Irritation of the mucous membranes occurs, the eyes become inflamed and painful.
When there is insufficient lighting, the quality of reading suffers; instead of focusing on the plot, a person only thinks about how uncomfortable he is. Therefore, it is better to devote time to books in a comfortable environment, in moderately bright light.
Helps you look at the situation from the outside
Psychologists believe that the benefit of reading books also lies in the opportunity to look at any situation from the perspective of literature. Often the literature describes situations, but also gives a way to solve them or several different options. Such literature belongs to the psychological genre and allows a person to better understand himself and the people around him.
Such a view from the pages of a book is perceived by a person better than advice given by another person. Because no one imposes a point of view on anyone, and a person does not associate the story of book characters with his friends. Therefore, books help to better understand other people and improve relationships with others.
Why you can't read on public transport
Many people think that reading on public transport is an ideal way to while away time on the road with a pleasant and useful activity. However, in fact, the properties of such reading can cause significant harm to health.
- Lighting in transport is unstable, even if it is bright enough; shadows from objects flashing outside the window and from the silhouettes of people passing by constantly fall on the pages of the book. The eyes have to constantly re-adapt to changing light, which puts extra strain on the visual organs.
- In a moving vehicle, the text in front of your eyes constantly shakes due to continuous vibration. This also strains the eyes - they get tired faster and begin to hurt.
If you read too often in public transport, the harm will be that your vision will gradually begin to decline.
For work and pleasure
However, not all books are destined to evoke empathy and interest in your brain. In her book “Why We Read Fiction: Theories of Mind and the Novel,” Professor Lisa Zunshine writes that the favorite genre is usually the one that suits the reader’s brain, for example, complex detective stories for fans of logic puzzles. But to get to the feelings themselves, one often has to break through the complex cognitive exercises that Virginia Woolf and Jane Austen, for example, included in their texts, Zunshine says, like the phrases “she knew that he thought that she was laughing at herself, and that bothered her.” Such constructions force one to experience several emotions sequentially.
Writer Maria Konnikova also remembers Jane Austen. In the article “What Jane Austen can teach us about how the brain pays attention,” she talks about an experiment by neuroscientist Natalie Phillips on different perceptions of text. The study involved English students unfamiliar with Austen's novel Mansfield Park. At first, they read the text in a relaxed mode - just to enjoy it. Then the experimenter asked them to analyze the text, pay attention to the structure, main themes, and warned them that they would have to write an essay about what they had read. All this time, the students were in an MRI machine, which monitored the functioning of their brains. With more relaxed reading, the centers responsible for pleasure in the brain were activated. When immersed in the text, activity shifted to the area responsible for attention and analysis. In fact, having set different goals, students saw two different texts.
Brain rewiring
French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehan jokes that the children who participate in his research feel like astronauts when they lie down in an MRI machine that resembles a spaceship capsule.
During the tests, Dean asks them to read and count to monitor brain function. The scan shows how even one word read revitalizes the brain. The brain acts logically, says Dean: at first, letters for it are just visual information, objects. But then it relates this visual code to what it already knows about the letters. That is, a person recognizes the letters and only then understands their meaning and how they are pronounced. This is because nature did not expect that man would invent this particular mechanism for transmitting information.
Reading is a revolutionary technique, an artificial interface that literally rebuilt our brain, which initially did not have a special department for recognizing linguistic symbols. The brain had to adapt for this purpose the primary visual cortex, through which the signal passes along the fusiform gyrus, responsible for recognizing faces. In the same convolution there is a repository of knowledge about languages - it is also called the “mailbox”.
Together with colleagues from Brazil and Portugal, Dean published a study, the conclusion of which is that the “letterbox” is active only in those who can read, and is stimulated only by letters known to a person: it will not respond to characters if you do not know Chinese. Reading also affects the functioning of the visual cortex: it begins to recognize objects more accurately, trying to distinguish one letter from another. The perception of sounds is transformed: thanks to reading, the alphabet is built into this process - when hearing a sound, a person imagines a letter.
Expands vocabulary and improves literacy levels
Many modern people underestimate the benefits of reading books. But they are one of the sources of replenishing your vocabulary. By reading various literature, a person learns new words and their meanings. Thanks to your extensive vocabulary, you can explain your thoughts to people in a detailed and clear manner; your speech will be interesting with well-written sentences.
If you compare the speech of a book lover and someone who spends many hours playing computer games, you will hear that their manner of speaking is very different. The one who reads will be able to structure the speech so that it is understandable to you, replace difficult-to-understand words with synonyms and add beautiful phrases to make it more interesting.
But how do books improve literacy levels? While reading, a person encounters the same words many times and remembers their correct spelling. It's the same with punctuation. Therefore, by reading books, a person increases his level of literacy.
Does reading make you smarter?
Reading is believed to be good for intelligence. But is this really so? An experiment by the Society for Research in Child Development among 1,890 identical twins ages 7, 9, 10, 12, and 16 found that early reading skills influence future overall intelligence. Children who were actively taught to read at an early age turned out to be smarter than their identical twins who did not receive such help from adults.
And New York University researchers found that reading short fiction stories immediately improves the ability to recognize human emotions. Participants in this study were divided into groups and determined the emotions of actors from photographs of their eyes after reading popular literature, non-fiction or fiction - the results of the latter group were much more impressive.
Many are skeptical about the results of these experiments. Thus, Pace University researchers conducted a similar experiment on guessing emotions and found that people who read more throughout their lives are indeed better at decoding facial expressions, but scientists urge not to confuse causation with correlation. They are not sure that the results of the experiment are related specifically to reading: perhaps these people read more precisely because they are empathetic, and not vice versa. And MIT cognitive neuroscientist Rebbeca Sachs notes that the research method itself is very weak, but scientists have to use it due to the lack of more advanced technologies.
Another high-profile study that is vulnerable to criticism was an experiment by scientists at the University of Liverpool. They measured the cognitive activity of literature students and found that students who were more well-read and capable of analyzing texts had increased brain activity. This conclusion also replaces correlation with causation: perhaps the most well-read participants showed such results because of their innate cognitive abilities (and for the same reason they fell in love with reading at one time).
But despite all the discrepancies, researchers will not stop and will continue to look for the benefits of reading, says Brown University literature professor Arnold Weinstein: after all, this is one of the effective ways to “save” literature in an era when its value and benefits are increasingly being called into question.
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What is better to read
Which useful books to choose to read is a question to which each person determines the answer independently. But first of all, it is recommended to determine what exactly the goal is.
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- If you need a book for general development, you should choose classical literature. Its main property is that classics develop a sense of beauty, stimulate thinking and imagination, and broaden one’s horizons.
- Scientific literature will be of interest to those who are passionate about specific problems in the exact or natural sciences, astronomy, physics, biology or medicine.
- It is recommended that even those who are not fans of versification become familiar with poetry. Good poetry develops imaginative thinking and teaches us to understand unusual associative series.
- Philosophical literature. Without preparation, one can easily get confused in such books, so it is better to start with collections of parables adapted for the average reader, and then move on to the works of famous authors.
Advice! When choosing best-selling books, you should carefully read the annotations and read the reviews.
Sometimes works of dubious artistic value gain short-lived popularity.
