Have you had your workout today? You need to get sucked into a good workout. Are you are looking for ways to improve your memory and concentration and relieve stress? Take a trip – read. Did you know that reading a book provides significant benefits to brain function? A little more than a quarter of Americans say they haven’t read a book in the past year. Not only will reading give you a good story to get sucked into, but your brain will be much stronger and healthier for it.
Know the term “use it or lose it”? Well, it applies to your brain. The brain-stimulating activities from reading slow down the cognitive and memory decline, and other mental capacities in old age for people who read over their lifetime. Your brain may not be a muscle, but it still needs to be worked out like one. The more you work your muscles, the bigger they get and the more power they have. The same thing goes for your brain. Reading keeps your brain busy and helps it create more synapses. Literally, the more you read and work out your brain, the more capacity it will have for all functions, especially memory. The brain, like the rest of the body, requires exercise to remain agile and alert, and reading helps to increase focus and concentration.
Reading Improves Brain Connectivity. The changes caused by reading are registered in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language, as well as the primary sensorimotor region of the brain. Believe it or not, “Psychology Today reports that approximately 42% of college graduates will never read a book again after graduating, but regular reading can have a positive impact on brain function. A research study conducted at Emory University that examined the correlation between brain function and reading a novel found that FMRI scans of study participants who read Robert Harris’s Pompeii showed “heightened connectivity in the left temporal cortex, an area of the brain associated with receptivity for language.”
The brain prunes itself, but far gentler than a hedge trimer. Synaptic pruning is one of the ways that your brain keeps itself running at maximum capacity. It slows or trims some of the seldom used synapses in order to run more efficiently and not waste energy on processes that you don’t use. In other words, if you don’t stimulate your brain (i.e. use your reading portion of the brain) for a long time, you will lose those reading synapses.
Reading provides mental stimulation. Sitting on the couch watching TV might be easy and enjoyable, but your brain isn’t working very hard. The pictures, story, dialogue and everything else have already been created. You don’t have to do any work. With books, though, the story might be there, but the world is yours to create. “Your brain has to produce all the images, colors, actions, and characters in addition to processing language, spelling, and grammar simultaneously.” That’s hard work!
Want to have a big head? Reading has been linked to helping slow the progression of Alzheimer’s. Studies with elderly Alzheimer’s patients show that people who read more frequently into their old age showed better mental capacity during life and scored higher on memory tests compared to people who didn’t read – stimulation. The most shocking part is that regular readers literally had larger, more connected brains at the time of their deaths despite the degenerative effects of the disease.
Reading can have significant benefits not only on our health and well-being, but it improves our ability to connect with others, improves empathy, and broadens our horizons beyond filling the void in a boring conversation. According to the same article in Psychology Today, “those who read regularly report an increased ability to step into someone else’s shoes and experience the world through alternative points of view.”
Books are portals into other worlds and other times, real and fictional, to boldly go where you have not gone before! They take us beyond our world and into someone else’s. They satisfy the curiosity of the elusive ‘What if?’ Take a trip down the canals of Venice in a gondola or explore the wilds of Africa or have tea with the Queen. What better way to visit. We can’t, for instance, take a trip in a time machine back to Victorian London, but we can read Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist and experience a realistic account of orphan life during that period as only Dickens can tell it.
One of the best ways to broaden your vocabulary and communicate more effectively is to read. According to an article on Exforzia, those who read regularly “have a large repository of information in their brains, and they can reach into that repository to pull out words whenever they need them.” Reading challenges us to improve our language skills not only because we expand our vocabulary when we look up unfamiliar words, but also because we learn to infer meaning from context.
Imagine, for instance, “that you’re reading a passage in a story in which a girl takes a walk on the seashore and discovers an abundance of shells. Perhaps you’ve never before encountered the word abundance, but when the story tells you that she hasn’t enough room in her basket to fit all of her findings, you can infer that abundance likely refers to a large quantity.”
A study was conducted by Penquin where they asked twenty “lapsed readers” to read for twenty minutes a day over a period of ten days and keep a diary to track their moods. One participant reported that “after reading for half an hour on my lunchbreak I felt happy, sharp, and cheerful, and the feeling lasted all afternoon.”
Part of this feeling stems from the fact that reading “helps us feel less isolated. One in four readers say that a book has helped them realize that other people have shared their life experiences.” Whether it’s a novel about a troubled marriage or a self-help book about how to overcome the pain of a broken heart, books remind us that we’re not journeying through this life alone and that we can learn and grow from sharing our stories with one another.
Many have participated in a book club to read and share thoughts about what was read. This allows us to open up and share our own stories. The shared act of reading can create the connective tissue that forges friendships and binds them through the ritual of sharing. Dr. Wade Fish, Director at Northcentral University’s Graduate School, said, “Reading expands a person’s appreciation toward other life experiences the reader is not personally experiencing, especially when reading topics that are not related to that reader’s job or lifestyle.”
Another NCU professor points out that reading is important to a child’s overall development. Dr. Jennifer Duffy said “Reading is a fundamental skill needed to function in society. Words – spoken and written – are the building blocks by which a child’s mind grows. Reading is not only essential to a child’s verbal and cognitive development, but it also teaches the child to listen, develop new language, and communicate. Additionally, books open a child’s imagination into discovering his or her world,” according to Dr. Duffy.
So turn off that TV and electronics. Enjoy the relaxation of reading a good book and get lost in your own little adventure. Explore the magic. Whatever the tale, new experiences are just waiting to be discovered; “beckoning you, enticing you, entreating you to pause, to sit down and to spend time between the pages of a good book.” Why don’t mummies go on vacation? They’re afraid they might unwind!