Obama's an Avid Reader - You?

Barak Obama's often spotted carrying a book. He enjoys novels, non-fiction and biographies. Obama's an avid reader. You? Benefits... reading stimulates writing, vocabulary development, speaking and understanding a variety of viewpoints.

Intriguingly, reading has shaped our history, our culture, our civilization, neuroscientist Maryanne Wolfe says.

Reading unleashes your brain's thinking box... Not too surprisingly, reading pushes you to reason at high 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.

Here's my current book queue: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures by Dan Roam, and Your Life as Story: Discovering the "New Autobiography" and Writing Memoir as Literature by Tristine Rainer. Plus, I expect two books in this week's mail.

What's in your current reading queue?