there's nothing less natural than
reading reading is an acquired set of
skills that literally changes the brain
everyone should be reading books this is
a life experience books and knowledge
books are community
without books we wouldn't be human in
the way that we are
literacy is one of the greatest
inventions of the human species first
fire then reading i'd say reading is the
blink of the eye in our evolutionary
clock it's only 6 000 years old
and it began in such a simple way to
mark how many wine vessels or sheep we
had and with the birth of alphabetic
systems we began to have an efficient
means of remembering and storing
knowledge
what reading does is exploit a principle
of design in the human brain that allows
it to make new connections between
visual regions language regions regions
for thought and emotion
it begins actually afresh in every new
reader it doesn't exist inside our head
each person who has to learn to read has
to create a brand new circuit in their
brain
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reading a great story is so much more
than entertainment reading actually has
many therapeutic benefits bibliotherapy
is the art of prescribing fiction to
cure life's ailments
claustrophobia rage exhaustion
and the cure is zorba the greek
reading brings three
magical powers creativity intelligence
and empathy
reading for the joy of it is one of the
two key factors in a kid's later
economic success you're more likely to
not be in prison to vote to own your own
home
all of these advantages and benefits
happen as a result of lipsy
your brain goes into a meditative state
a physical process which slows your
heartbeat and calms you down and reduces
anxiety
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when we read at a surface level we're
just getting the information
when we read deeply we use much more of
our cerebral cortex
deep reading means that we make
analogies we make inferences which
allows us to be truly critical analytic
empathic human
beings we think of the book as the work
but the book is just a delivery
mechanism the novel is evolving there's
all sorts of amazing books which are
being written deliberately to be read on
phones these kind of new mediums they're
giving a voice to
new generation of writers who don't have
to kind of get through a bottleneck
stops us from having this kind of
conditioning as to what is good writing
and it actually allows people just to
talk and share stories and to share
experiences isn't mathematic doesn't
matter how you get it it's a story
and the book maybe provides this
illusion that this is it it's never been
it it's a way into a thought process
we brought together scholars and
scientists from over 30 countries to do
research about the impact of
digitization on reading we found that
there is what they call a screen
inferiority there's a lot that can be
equally well read on your smartphone
shorter news updates but with something
that is cognitively or emotionally
challenging reading on a screen leads to
poorer reading comprehension than
reading on paper
the reality is it's not what or how much
we read but how we read that's really
important the very volume
is having negative effects because to
absorb that much there's a propensity
towards skimming
the reading brain has a plastic
circuitry
the circuit will reflect the
characteristics of the medium with which
it reads
the characteristics of the digital are
going to be reflected in the circuit if
we don't train those capacities we may
eventually lose the ability to
understand more complex content and also
perhaps to engage and to imagine
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the human imagination is a fantastic
thing we're very flexible we find ways
of doing what we want with the
technology we've got
i think we'll see a lot more short story
collections and i think we'll see a lot
more shorter books
i've changed the way that i write
because children's attention span has
got shorter the chapters are short it's
incredibly visual look
shiny like a
sweet just as people can be bi and
trilingual my hope is that we will be
developing a biliterate brain
we can discipline ourselves to choose
the medium that is best suited for what
we're reading so that we don't lose the
extraordinary
gifts
that reading has given our species
so what would happen if we stopped
reading books
we die we die we'd be so boring
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