Reading: It grows the brain
When ebooks first appeared, I despaired. If they replaced that more tactile, fuller sensory experience of paper books and journals, would libraries go away? Would librarians morph into mere Internet programming?
Not yet. At my local library in Hayden this week I was lucky to find parking space. Granted, many patrons stared at computer terminals and video displays, but the stacks weren’t entirely lonely and full staffing was apparent. Perhaps the computers, too, are used for reading. For now, the underappreciated realm of library science seems to remain strong.
Yet, readers know the habit is declining. Once past schooling, far fewer adults than in prior decades read books. No; social media doesn’t count.
More discouraging is what interests the general public. With thousands of news, science, quality fiction, and historical media now available from across the globe at one’s fingertips both online and on paper, these mind-enriching areas once consumed daily over breakfast and before bed by the average person aren’t what gets the most traffic.
What does? Dumb and dumberer. According to the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, more than 800,000 people watched a live video from BuzzFeed of rubber bands being added around a watermelon until it exploded. That’s 52 percent more than MSNBC’s (with all kinds of news — good, bad, and lighthearted) total daytime viewers for the entire month of February. This and other newspapers find similar reactions to story headlines.
We just aren’t as interested in paying attention for long, in analyzing what affects our lives, in thinking.
The more we read, the more the mind expands. Multiple studies and brain scans have shown that when we read things which couple time with imagination or analytical processing, i.e., books, the mind literally expands, adding dendrites which permit more brain activity. Dendrites extend from one neuron to the next, passing along signals.
Science tells us we can add dendrites lifelong, but they also die from inactivity. More dendrites formed means more facilitation among different parts of the brain — more complex thinking. In other words, reading in depth makes us smarter (more knowledge has also been linked to better physical and mental health, and longer life).
So reading less means we are thinking at lower levels.
What does that collectively impaired thinking mean for society, for current and future political leaders, for human relations? What can any of us do to change that?
We can frequent bookstores and libraries, and make reading a priority. This is National Library Week. Libraries transform, and by simply reading we can transform the future. And have fun, in infinitely more ways than one.
“There’s bleeding between age groups in terms of reading material, and there’s bleeding between media. So there are books that are clearly comics and books that are prose, and then there are these books that are kind of in-between,” — Gene Luen Yang, graphic novelist and Library Week’s honorary chair.
To all librarians, their staff, and supporters: Thank you for lovingly maintaining those myriad galaxies of creativity, awareness, and mental nourishment.
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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist for the Hagadone News Network who escapes with English mysteries, learns from historical fiction, and quickly reaches her limits in astrophysics. Novelist suggestions desired at Sholeh@cdapress.com.