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 it.
Books are life experience, books are knowledge.
Books are communities.
Without books, we wouldn’t be human in the way that we are.
What is reading
Literacy is one of the greatest inventions of the human species.
First fire, then reading, I’d say.
Reading is the blink of an eye in our evolutionary clock.
It’s only six thousand years old, and it started 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 actually begins 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.
Benefits of reading
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 kids 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 literacy.
Your brain goes into a meditative state.
A physical process which slows your heartbeat and calms you down,
and reduces anxiety.
When we read at a surface level, we’re just getting the information.
When we read deeply, we’re using much more of our cerebral cortex.
Deep reading means that we make analogies, we make inferences,
which allows us to be truly critical, analytical, empathic, human beings.
Delivery mechanism
We think of the book as the work,
but the book is just a delivery mechanism.
The novel is evolving.
There are all sorts of amazing books which are being written deliberately
to be read on phones.
These kind of new mediums, they are giving a voice
to a 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.
It doesn’t matter the medium, it 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.
Screen inferiority
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 is 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.
Conclusion
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 connections,
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 gotten shorter.
The chapters are short, it’s incredibly visual.
Look, shiny like a sweet.
Just and 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 gift
that reading has given our species.
So, what would happen if we stopped reading books?
We’d die.
We’d die. We’d be so boring.
