Brian J Mundell
Everyone should understand the importance of taking care of yourself. Study after study shows improving your physical health will increase longevity, improve your immune system, and positively affect your mood, among many other things. Not to mention, being physically stronger allows you to perform better at any physical task, whether it’s sports, yard work, or just keeping up with your friends on a hike.
Regular exercise is an age-old method for improving physical health. You show up, lift the weight, do the reps, work up a sweat, and you’re done. It’s not always easy, but it’s fairly straightforward.
Now wouldn’t it be great if there was a similar method for exercising the mind? If I told you there was one activity you could do that would make you more imaginative, boost your memory, and improve your social skills, you might be skeptical. But there is: reading.
Reading a book has the power to change you as a person. The act of reading brings new facts to light and comes with an experience for you to take with you. This change is not easily forgotten.
When we read, we’re literally changing our minds—our brains, rather. Reading has the power to change the physical structure of your brain by increasing white matter and strengthening connections between different parts of your brain.
Our brains are made up of neurons and those neurons communicate by sending electrical signals back and forth. The quality of these pathways and connections between neurons in different parts of the brain more or less determine the quality of our cognitive function: how quickly we access memory, how quickly we process information, and how we might respond to given information.
Our thoughts and feelings are strongly associated with what parts of the brain are excited. Typically, the more pathways we have in the brain, the better. Similarly, the more often these pathways get used, the stronger they are, and the better they’ll perform when you need them.
Interestingly, despite the fact that reading and speaking are both forms of verbal communication, different processes occur when we read versus when we speak. The ability to speak occurred much earlier than written language in our evolutionary history and is more ingrained in our development as humans by now. In fact, scientists have identified human genes that play a major role in our ability to speak (the ROBO2 gene, for example). The same can’t be said for the ability to read.
Genes aside, common sense tells us there’s a difference between the natural propensity for speaking and the not-so-natural ability for reading. A toddler doesn’t need to be taught much to start speaking; if they’re around adults that speak, they naturally pick up the language and start speaking. On the other hand, you can’t just leave children with books and expect them to understand the words on the pages.
So the pathways for speaking are already wired in our brains, whereas the pathways for reading have to be developed through conscious effort. Reading is a learned activity. But, what’s more is that reading uses more parts of our brains than speaking, and again, those pathways all have to be developed.
If we were shown an image of a dog and asked to identify the image, light would hit our eyes, send information to the visual cortex to process that information, then to Broca’s area of the brain (the front of the dominant hemisphere) to associate the image with a word, and finally to the motor cortex to actually speak the word ‘dog’.
During the reading process, we’re not just looking at an image, but a set of abstract symbols, which requires extra steps. Our eyes and visual cortex process what we’re looking at, but then the information goes to the temporo-parietal cortex which plays a role in decoding the meaning of the word, and then it’s off to Broca’s area and the motor cortex.
No wonder it’s a struggle to get people to read. A lot goes on in our brains when we read, making reading an arduous task. Not to mention, it’s time consuming, so it’s only natural to limit reading to productive texts—if we even read much at all.
It’s common for people to dismiss fiction as ‘productive’, but they would be mistaken. It’s fine to want to focus on reading non-fiction. Non-fiction is informative and oftentimes you know what you’re getting when you pick out a non-fiction book. Atomic Habits will show you how to build systems that make it easy to start and keep up with small, but good habits that ultimately lead to achieving your larger goals. It’s direct and practical. By reading non-fiction, you are indeed exercising all the parts in your brain that reading requires. Plus, you’re learning what the text has to say. You’re creating new pathways in the brain by connecting ideas in a new way. Every book is different in that regard, and that’s why people tend to emphasize ‘productive reading’ like non-fiction. But what if you were missing out on additional benefits?
Fiction offers far more benefits as a mental exercise by immersing you in a completely foreign experience. You don’t learn ideas with fiction so much as you practice ideas. The goal of fiction isn’t necessarily to convey information in a direct way like non-fiction does. Fiction writing is art, and there is plenty of wisdom to be found in art, you just have to do some extra work to understand it. But that extra work makes for good exercise!
With non-fiction, you may learn a lot of practical information and make new connections that influence how you think in the world. That is transformative in itself. But fiction puts you in the place of the character—you know their every thought and feeling—so when they are put in a situation, it’s like you are put in that same situation. And while you follow along on the character’s journey, you’re not only seeing their thoughts and feelings, but you’re also developing your own thoughts and feelings about each situation.
For every experience you read about in a fictional story, you get the same benefits as if you had been through that experience yourself. Research backs this up in a very tangible way. When we’re looking at a single word or phrase, our brain goes through the process outlined above. But when we actually read a passage and immerse ourselves in a story, surprising parts of the brain are unlocked. When we read about physical and emotional pain, pain centers in the brain light up. When we read about an action scene, the part of our brain that controls our motor skills lights up. When we read about a character dealing with interpersonal issues, our ‘social brain’ lights up.
We may only be reading about these experiences, but our brain goes through the motions as if we’re actually living these experiences. Another study was done which had participants read a few pages of a novel before bed each night. Then, in the morning the researchers performed an MRI brain scan. Not only did their brains change, but they changed each and every day, and they changed in the way you’d expect a person’s brain to change if they had lived out the experiences that the participant read about.
The research is clear: reading fiction can offer experiences that have a profound effect on who you are. If the story you’re reading offers a lot of reflection, you’ll take those reflections with you. If the story you’re reading is chock full of social exchanges with charming, witty, shy, calculating, or greedy characters, you’ll integrate some of those traits. And if the story you’re reading is full of action and fast-paced decision making, you might become a real life James Bond.
But don’t movies offer all of the same benefits? When I was in high school I had dismissed reading fiction mainly because I could just watch the movie. You get the same entertainment value and the same experience for less time and even less effort. So what if people claimed the book was better? It can’t be that much better.
But it can. While movies can offer you a fully immersive experience, you inevitably miss out on a ton of details. The biggest of which is the character’s internal dialogue.
A lot can be learned about a character from the internal dialogue they have with themselves. You learn their thought process, what they think of themselves, what they think of others, etc. Some of that might be shown on screen through their actions, or their dialogue with other characters, or even a narrator, but it will always fall short of reading it explicitly in the book. You may see on screen what they do, but you don’t know why they did it. They may explain to another character why they did something, but that’s not an honest representation of who they are, it’s just who they want to present themselves as to this other character. And the narrator may explain themselves, but they can only say so much in a given amount of time. There are no restrictions when it comes to a book like there are in a movie. What needs to be said gets said, and what needs to be experienced gets experienced—by you, the reader.
Once again, research backs all this up. Because watching the movie is such a low effort activity, the brain does a lot less work in processing it. The result is, although it feels like you’re more immersed in the movie, the movie doesn’t leave as much of a lasting impression on the brain. There’s no need for visualization beyond processing what’s going on on screen, so that part of the brain goes unused and you’re not strengthening your imagination. Additionally, you’re not processing the words because there are no words with a movie (save for some translations and credits), so the temporo parietal cortex isn’t used quite as much. And because the movie takes place in such a short time frame relative to reading a book, your memory isn’t worked as much either. The movie doesn’t bounce around and isn’t given a chance to seep its way to the inner parts of your consciousness because watching a movie is a passive activity.
Now, don’t get me wrong, movies are fantastic. There is a lot of value in movies as an art and also as entertainment. And just because you watched a movie instead of reading the book doesn’t mean you’ll finish the experience completely unchanged, only to forget it immediately afterwards. Every story has a message and you’ll pick up on that with the movie. What I’m saying is the movie won’t be as transformative an experience. And with that in mind, even though a movie may take less time, you’ll get more out of reading the book than you would watching the movie and is therefore worth the extra time.
So if you’re not a reader, start reading something—anything. Exercise your mind. Continue to build those pathways. It only gets easier. If you’re one of those people who only reads non-fiction, I was there once, but now I’ve come to love and appreciate good fiction. Start mixing it in. When you find a good story, it turns out to be a much easier read than most non-fiction books, and you still get plenty out of it. If you don’t believe the benefits are there, start off slow and test it out with a few short stories. You can finish them in one sitting and you won’t be losing much of your time.
Reading of any kind will make you a sharp thinker and a more well-rounded person. The benefits may not be immediately obvious, but very real changes occur every time you read. Just like lifting weights is something you should do out of self respect, because you deserve to be fit and healthy, reading is something you also should do out of self respect, because you deserve to be witty and wise.
You can start reading right here on my website. I have dozens of scifi short stories available and if you want to dig into my favorite scifi stories, check out my suggested reading list.
Brian J Mundell 