Reading Unleashes Your Brain's Thinking Box

A book is the only place in which you can examine a fragile thought without breaking it, or explore an explosive idea without fear it will go off in your face. It is one of the few havens remaining where a man's mind can get both provocation and privacy. ~Edward P. Morgan

Books can be dangerous. The best ones should be labeled "This could change your life." ~Helen Exley

How many books have you read in the last couple of months? I notice many bloggers include favorite books on side columns of blogs. What might happen if you read books and blogs more? Reading offers both the imaginative and the practical...

Imaginative In The Uncommon Reader, British writer and actor Alan Bennett, imagines what might happen if the queen read more. Hmmm... bet your mind never went there... does that rouse your curiosity?

As Bennett pictures it, the queen was not big on books, and one day discovers how much she likes them. She "gets so absorbed in reading that even while riding in a carriage," as Bennett characterizes this, "she is reading a book with one hand while waving to her subjects with the other."

Through her reading, Bennett's queen becomes more aware of the political world and the world in general.

"She starts having opinions and she starts really for the first time in her life putting herself in other people's shoes," Bennett says. "She'd never really imagined what it was like to be one of her subjects. And now she does. Books really humanize her, I think."

One gem in fiction is character... What is behind peoples' choices? Historical fiction opens a window to both imagination and fact so that history's fascinating. Does fiction capture your interest?

Practical On the other hand, non-fiction draws readers, in different ways... "How to..." books, science, history, business, technology... Non-fiction helps folks navigate all the practical aspects of today's world.

Women Read More Interestingly, research shows that women read more than men...

A couple of years ago, British author Ian McEwan conducted an admittedly unscientific experiment. He and his son waded into the lunch-time crowds at a London park and began handing out free books. Within a few minutes, they had given away 30 novels.

Nearly all of the takers were women, who were "eager and grateful" for the freebies while the men "frowned in suspicion, or distaste." The inevitable conclusion, wrote McEwan in The Guardian newspaper: "When women stop reading, the novel will be dead."

McEwan's prognosis is surely hyperbole, but only slightly. Surveys consistently find that women read more books than men, especially fiction.

Maybe biological differences between male and female brains affect these choices, or guys' magnetism to technology or the way girls and boys are introduced to reading at a young age... No matter what: Americans—men and women—are reading fewer books.

People Reading Less Last month The Associated Press and Ipsos, a market-research firm, released poll results revealing that Americans on the average "read only four books last year, and one in four adults read no books at all."

A National Endowment for the Arts report found that only 57 percent of Americans had read a book in 2002 a four percentage-point drop in a decade. Book sales have been flat in recent years and are expected to stay that way for the foreseeable future.

Young people, in general, read less than older people, and that does not bode well for books and the people who love them.

Reading Stirs Higher Cognitive Processes What advantage is there for folks to read? For openers, it affects ability to reason at higher cognitive levels. Here's what goes on in your brain as you read...

The large mass of white matter, consisting of bundles of fibres, links the white matter of your brain's two cerebral hemispheres. The corpus callosum carries a large number of fibres from one cerebral hemisphere to the other and is the major route of communication between the two hemispheres to control cognitive and motor function.

White Matter Matters in Reading Performance The white matter is basically the wiring in the middle," Dr. Christian Beaulieu, Professor, Department of Biomedical Engineering in Alberta, Canada, explains.

"The way I see it, the grey matter is the computers and the white matter is the wiring or the Ethernet cable that connects them all up and lets them communicate."

His research team concentrated on the "wiring" that connects different parts of the brain and observed that measurable differences in the wiring can be found in children... They found that the stronger the connectivity of the white matter "wiring," the better the child's reading ability. Since our brains have remarkable plasticity, as you begin to read more, you build more reading acumen.

Reading opens your mind to a world of new ideas you would not otherwise explore... whether by book, magazine, newspaper or blog... And, like Bennett's Queen, you'll have new opinions and you'll step into the shoes of other people and see the world differently...

To compete in tomorrow's world of business, be ready... explore a vast world of ideas...

What book will you read next?

Try, Valeria Maltoni's Picnic '07 on Experience, Storytelling, Social Objects, Complexity, Simplicity and Choice for a blog to stretch ideas... What blogs enlarge your mind?