How Does Reading Affect Your Brain?

Alphabets are special symbols, which have great impact on the brain of human being when a person reads some thing. Besides influencing the motor skills, it plays part in the cognitive processes of a human being, formation of emotional intelligence and the ability to memorize information. In this article, I discuss how reading affects your brain and what kind of impact it has in the short time as well as in the long run. But knowing these advantages can help motivate you to increase reading’s importance in your day-to-day life.

The Cognitive Benefits of Reading

Analysing the information you read, your brain also operates at optimum levels improving various functions in the process. Consequently, reading comprehension, analysis and enhancement in one ‘s vocabulary are benefits of reading. And, therefore, it enhances the brain connection, which is so vital in improving the functions of your brain as one ages.

Reading often is useful in enhancing improved concentration and therefore focus greatly. Every time you read a story in a book, your mind tends to save data concerning actions, characters, and events that are taking place. Through this, the brain gets a good exercise and the neural connections get tough making the brain to improve the way it handles information.

In the same regard, Surowiecki in the new yorker also demonstrated that reading fiction enhances creativity. Thus, while becoming one with the characters of a work and perceiving their existence, you wake up your imagination and accept new opinions. On the other hand, non-fiction reading gives you information that you need to learn and also make you understand complex issues thus increasing you mental capacity.

How Reading Stimulates Brain Activity

Reading is not only an idle pastime but it can be considered one of the exercises for the brain. While reading, the neurological machinery of the brain is asked for a symbol deciphering (letters and words), meaning discerning and imagery. This is the case since this process involves activation of several regions of the brain such as language, vision and associative learning.

Some research done were done using MRI scans and discovered that reading helps stimulate blood flow to the brain especially on the left side of the brain, which is supposed to be responsible for analytical and critical thinking. This heightened brain activity doesn’t occur only when you are reading of a book or article and the likes. Research indicates that reading continues to benefit the brain well after the book has been closed adding to the healthy future of the human brain.

In addition, daily reading has the effect of keeping alzheimers away, or in other words, can slow down the rate of cognitive deterioration. The mental activity brought about by reading helps boost your brain and reduces the possibility of getting diseases like dementia and Alzheimer’s towards the future.

The Impact of Reading on Emotional Intelligence

Doing something such as reading not only enhances your thinking capacity, but also assists in building up of the emotional quotients. Emotional intelligence can be defined as the capacity people have to recognize and regulate their own emotions as well as the capacity to understand and regulate emotions present in another person. Fiction enables you to embark on a journey through the vicissitudes of the characters’ feelings and gain the knowledge of other people’s lives.

Reading and Empathy Development

Empathy is regarded as one of the biggest ways whereby reading has an impact on the improvement of the emotional intelligence. Once readers go through, say, characters and the challenges that various characters have to face, one gets to know the emotions or feelings towards issues. Such practice as learning about the experiences of other people through literature enhances one’s ability to feel for them, which is important when establishing relationships in real life.

Also, the matter one reads may Ly help one be more sympathetic and accepting of people of different backgrounds. Such changes may cause improvements or even enhancements of interpersonal communication and consequent enhanced social integration.

Reading and Memory Retention

Book reading is also one of the best ways of enhancing memory. You have to memorize characters, plot and various sub plots of the story while reading and it helps in working out your memory. It is a simple mental exercise that improves on the memory muscles of the human brain.

Also, when you read and consolidate knowledge, the cortex forms new dendrites, or pathways of neurons, in the brain. These new pathways also enhance ability of your brain to help you remember information and possibly increase memory.

It is said that in situations you gain skills in memory the more you read the better the memory gets. This can be especially advantageous when getting old, as it assists to defer the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and other age related ailments that affect the brain.

Long-Term Benefits of Regular Reading

There a lot of advantages that we gain once we make reading as a habit in the long-run. The authors found out that people who read their newspaper more often have better cognitive function as well as improved mental health throughout the entire life cycle. It helps to alleviate stress as well as increases the quality of your life and even contributes to the length of your life span.

In his research on mental health expert has discovered that reading decreases the effects of aging on the mind a lot and individuals who read a lot had better mental health than those who read least. This is because reading helps the brain to be active and stimulated to avoid cases of early development of Alzheimers disease.

Further, reading makes a huge difference to the quality of life of an individual. It expands horizons, provides educational experiences at everyone’s finger tips and enables individuals to find others like themselves through experiences.

How to Incorporate More Reading into Your Daily Life

The following are some simple ways that can be used to ensure that more reading is integrated in to one’s daily schedule. Schedule a particular time of the day you wish to read as a way of allowing yourself adequate time for reading. Reading doesn’t necessarily have to be done at this time but incorporating it to your daily routine whether in the morning or before sleeping has significant cumulative gains.

Choosing the Right Material for Brain Health

What you should read is not arbitrary when it comes to the health of the brain. As with any form of learning, some types of material can be more invigorating to your brain than others. Fiction for instance can help develop creativity as well as empathy while on the other hand non-fiction can help in knowledge as well as critical thinking.

It is therefore recommended that one flood his/her mind with this kind of literature by trying to read different type of literature whether just news, travel, gossip, fiction, business, politics, sports, technology and what have you. This variety will ensure that your brain is working all the time thus being healthy as well as improving its functionality.

Conclusion

First of all, reading is one of the most effective means to improve the state of brain and emotional condition. Reading helps in enhancing memory as well as fostering feeling of empathy, this is some of the gains of reading. This means that when you’ve made it a habit to read often, you benefit from the above-mentioned advantages and help your brain for many years.