Books develop the brain

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

If a story is written especially convincingly and talentedly, then anyone's imagination will play out. The biology of the reader's brain is changing, allowing for physical sensations while reading.

As determined by Emory University, changes remain in effect for at least five days after reading the work. An experiment was conducted in which a group of volunteers were asked to read a thriller. Over the next five days, an MRI scan of the brain was performed.

It turned out that throughout this period, there were increased levels of activity of connections in the left temporal cortex, which is responsible for the tongue. The same thing happened in the central groove separating the sensory part of the cortex from the motor. This triggers the phenomenon of "transfer": it is enough for a person to think about running so that the neurons responsible for it are activated.

Reading is the hardest brain exercise. This is its benefit and this is the reason for the difficulties in learning to read and write …

The latest MRI study has confirmed that most of the higher areas of the brain are involved in reading. This means that reading can be seen as the best exercise for keeping the brain "in shape" …

Learning to read and write was considered by all civilizations as a key step in the intellectual development of a person, despite any difficulties and time costs. As it turned out, behind such a view lies not only the “external” usefulness of reading / writing, but also the very way our brain functions.

The brain of a person who can read works in a much more complex way than the brain of an illiterate person. Moreover, the brain of a person who practiced reading in childhood is better able to activate all its resources than the brain of a person who learned to read as an adult.

During the experiment, the volunteers were presented with various test tasks, which included recognizing objects, faces, oral messages, written sentences, and math problems.

It turned out that in a literate person, when recognizing text, the visual area of the cerebral cortex begins to work much more intensively, the areas responsible for processing sound information are activated, and several other brain centers are simultaneously turned on.

But not only this characterizes the work of the "literate brain" - even with the perception of only oral information, a literate person begins to work more intensively than an illiterate one, the phonological area starts to work and several other zones are turned on.

The zones in the temporal and occipital lobes of the left cerebral cortex work especially intensively when reading (it is characteristic that many of these zones are associated with face recognition). The most important for reading was the area of convergence of the occipital and temporal lobes. And so much so that this area has undergone significant changes, incl. those who learned to read as an adult.

There is still no evidence that competition between reading and other types of activity reduces the quality of the latter (although the results of the described experiment have demonstrated, for example, that illiterate volunteers start to work noticeably more intensively when showing a human face than those who learned to read in childhood). Researched hope to clarify this issue in the following experiments …

So, we can safely say that Reading is one of the best exercises for keeping your entire brain fit. This is all the more important, considering that such competitors to reading as “developing” computer games have shown themselves to be very dubious “trainers for the mind”.

Especially the exercise of the brain by reading should be relevant for people who need to restore brain function after severe trauma or stroke. It is known that the brain is a very flexible organ, and if, for example, one of its “modules” is damaged, others try to perform its function. And if a person continues to intensively train this function, then it can be restored almost completely. It turns out that ordinary reading here should help a lot …

Another important implication from the study results: Difficulty learning to read and write is natural … If a child (and even more so an adult) cannot easily master this seemingly ordinary type of activity, then now one should remember that what seems elementary outwardly is actually one of the most difficult tasks that the human brain can only solve …

General conclusion: constant reading exercise not only improves this reading and, for example, broadens the horizons, but also increases the efficiency of the brain in almost all areas of human activity …