Different activities can lead to positive brain changes. One is reading. It is fascinating and makes incredible changes, I must say that not all books are able to have a great mental impact, according to several studies reading stories about characters, real or fictional, is one of the activities that generate the most transformations.
Today many wonder what literature is for, in fact, some even question its value, believing that it is the same as watching a movie, but with an extra dose of difficulty: a book and its lyrics must compete with the special effects obtained in film or television. Not everyone can get to the point where you’re part of the book you’re reading, so they prefer to see everything on one screen.
- However.
- It is clear that reading is a very different experience to watch a movie.
- First you need more concentration.
- Abstraction and imagination.
- Second.
- The changes it causes in the brain are much more intense and lasting.
- Let’s see what some are.
- Experts say.
Your perception of the world changes when you read. As Keith Oatley, professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto, Canada, reading a well-described scene is like seeing it.
What your mind does is bring from your memory objects similar to the scene described, it’s like creating a kind of mental photography. As a result, several processes are activated at the same time, involving memory, perception and creativity.
At the end of a playback that contains several well-described scenes, we will have the opportunity to create our own album of non-transferable scenes, it is your mind that hosts all the elements, making an association between what you read and what you know. This causes changes in the brain in terms of perception and intelligence.
Raymond Mar, a doctoral researcher in psychology at York University, goes further: studies have shown that there is evidence that the brain does not distinguish between what it reads and what it experiences, something similar happens when you watch a film, but in the case of the reading experience, it is more intimate and profound, so it generates more significant brain changes.
Our brain behaves very similarly when we imagine a story and when we live it in reality. Mar said that by reading what a character does, the same areas that the character would need to activate are activated in our brains to achieve what is proposed, that is, we live this reading as if we were the character itself.
These changes that occur in the brain are so relevant that they can be located and identified through neuroimaging tests, for example, when the character walks, in our brain the motor areas related to gait are activated, we literally live what we read, and all thanks to a specific type of neuron, the mirror neuron. Yes, the ones that, for example, make us imitate a yawn when we see someone yawning, or the ones that make a baby smile when we smile at them.
Researchers place a lot of emphasis on reading-induced brain changes on empathy. First, they found that the areas of the brain that are used to read and understand the actions of certain characters are the same as those we use to understand others. In the end, what remains at the heart of both experiments is a communication process.
Then, on the one hand, we live what the character experiences as if we were ourselves, on the other hand, by doing this exercise, we also increase our ability to understand others, by combining situations and emotions. Conclusion: reading is a way, to practice and enrich our empathy. We change our perspective when we read a story.
Dr. Mar gives a concrete example. It refers to the case of a person with a disability, if your experiences are told in detail and we have no limits, the time will come when we will understand how that person feels, that is, we learn to put ourselves in the place of others.
These are just some of the contributions that reading brings us, are the brain changes that occur when you take a book in your hands and you are captured from it, there are dozens of them. A good reading transforms us positively, allows us to grow, unite more deeply with humanity and be smarter.