Any book lover can let you know: diving into a
great novel is an immersive experience that can
make your brain wake up with imagery and
feelings and even turn on your senses. It sounds
sentimental, however there’s genuine, hard proof
that supports these things happening to your
brain when you read books. In reading, we can
really physically change our brain structure,
become more empathetic, and even trick our
brains into thinking we’ve encountered what
we’ve only read in novels.
1. We make photos in our minds, even without
being prompted:
Reading books and different materials with clear
imagery is not only fun, it additionally allows us
to create worlds in our own minds. But did you
realize that this happens regardless of the fact
that you don’t mean it to? Researchers have
observed that visual imagery is simply automatic.
Participants were able to identify photos of
objects faster if they’d just read a sentence that
described the object visually, recommending that
when we read a sentence, we naturally raise
pictures of objects in our minds.
2 Spoken word can put your brain to
work:
Critics are quick to dismiss audiobooks as a sub-
par reading experience, but research has shown
that the act of listening to a story can light up
your brain. When we’re told a story, not only are
language processing parts of our brain activated,
experiential parts of our brain come alive, too.
Hear about food? Your sensory cortex lights up,
while motion activates the motor cortex. And
while you may think that this is limited only to
audiobooks or reading, experts insist that our
brains are exposed to narratives all day long. In
fact, researcher Jeremy Hsu shares, “Personal
stories and gossip make up 65% of our
conversations.” So go ahead, listen to your
coworker’s long and drawn out story about their
vacation, tune in to talk radio, or listen to an
audiobook in the car: it’s good exercise for your
brain.
3. Reading about experiences is almost
the same as living it:
Have your ever felt so connected to a story that
it’s as if you experienced it in real life? There’s a
good reason why: your brain actually believes
that you have experienced it. When we read, the
brain does not make a real distinction between
reading about an experience and actually living it.
Whether reading or experiencing it, the same
neurological regions are stimulated. Novels are
able to enter into our thoughts and feelings.
While you can certainly hop into a VR game at the
mall and have a great time, it seems that reading
is the original virtual reality experience, at least
for your brain.
4. Different styles of reading create different
patterns in the brain:
Any kind of reading provides stimulation for your
brain, but different types of reading give different
experiences with varying benefits. Stanford
University researchers have found that close
literary reading in particular gives your brain a
workout in multiple complex cognitive functions,
while pleasure reading increases blood flow to
different areas of the brain. They concluded that
reading a novel closely for literary study and
thinking about its value is an effective brain
exercise, more effective than simple pleasure
reading alone.
5. New languages can grow your brain:
Want to really give your brain a workout? Pick up
a foreign language novel. Researchers at Lund
University in Sweden tested students from the
Swedish Armed Forces Interpreter Academy,
where intensive language learning is the norm,
and medicine and cognitive science students at
Umea University. Both groups underwent brain
scans just prior to and right after a three-month
period of intensive study. Amazingly, the language
students experienced brain growth in both the
hippocampus and the cerebral cortex, with
different levels of brain growth according to the
amount of effort and learning students
experienced in that period of time.
6. Your brain adapts to reading e-
books in seven days:
If you’re used to reading paper books, picking up
an e-reader can feel very awkward at first. But
experts insist that your brain can adopt the new
technology quickly, no matter your age or how
long you’ve been reading on paper. In fact, the
human brain adapts to new technology, including
e-reading, within seven days.
7. E-books lack in spatial navigability:
Although your brain can adapt to e-books quickly,
that doesn’t mean they offer the same benefits as
a paperback. Specifically, they lack what’s called
“spatial navigability,” physical cues like the heft of
pages left to read that give us a sense of
location. Evolution has shaped our minds to rely
on location cues to find our way around, and
without them, we can be left feeling a little lost.
Some e-books offer little in the way of spatial
landmarks, giving a sense of an infinite page.
However, with page numbers, percentage read,
and other physical cues, e-books can come close
to the same physical experience as a paper book.
8. Story structure encourages our brains to think in
sequence, expanding our attention spans:
Stories have a beginning, middle, and end, and
that’s a good thing for your brain. With this
structure, our brains are encouraged to think in
sequence, linking cause and effect. The more you
read, the more your brain is able to adapt to this
line of thinking. Neuroscientists encourage
parents to take this knowledge and use it for
children, reading to kids as much as possible. In
doing so, you’ll be instilling story structure in
young minds while the brain has more plasticity,
and the capacity to expand their attention span.
9. Reading changes your brain structure (in a good
way):
Not everyone is a natural reader. Poor readers
may not truly understand the joy of literature, but
they can be trained to become better readers.
And in this training, their brains actually change.
In a six-month daily reading program from
Carnegie Mellon, scientists discovered that the
volume of white matter in the language area of
the brain actually increased. Further, they showed
that brain structure can be improved with this
training, making it more important than ever to
adopt a healthy love of reading.
10. Deep reading makes us more empathetic:
It feels great to lose yourself in a book, and doing
so can even physically change your brain. As we
let go of the emotional and mental chatter found
in the real world, we enjoy deep reading that
allows us to feel what the characters in a story
feel. And this in turn makes us more empathetic
to people in real life, becoming more aware and
alert to the lives of others.
http://infoatedu.com/brain-on-books-10-things-that-happen-to-our-minds-when-we-read/