Dr Jack Close. Reading Changes your Brain, let me explain.

In medical school, I have been fascinated by neurology so I want to know what happens when we
read is there actually a scientific reason why it's so good okay so I’m just going to nerd out a little
bit right now but stick with me I promise it won't be too boring but I don't know if I can actually
stick.
How does reading affect the brain? When we read we start by seeing all of the patterns and
shapes on the page these images are then sent to the back of the brain where they are processed just
like any other next it goes to temporal lobe specifically to an area called the brain's letterbox this is
where the black squiggles are then recognized as letters in a word this information then travels from
the letterbox to the frontal lobe and other areas of the temporal lobe there we work out what this
word actually means and how it's pronounced in an experienced reader this whole process takes less
than half a second I know what you're thinking why does this matter jack well I found a study
showing that people Why should we read?
that read 30 pages of a book each night have more left temporal lobe activity the next morning
memory is found in this area so there's been some studies that link reading with lower risks of
dementia it's also linked to emotional regulation so this could potentially explain why a lot of
people find that reading helps to reduce their stress and anxiety this area is also responsible for
verbal recall so it might help you to retrieve your words retrieve your words a little bit quicker
although these second two points were only shown to work in the short term so that means you have
to build a habit to get those benefits and that's what I’ve been trying to do right so I’ve worked out
how it works I’ve got a brief understanding of it so how am I actually going to build this habit Start
small
well I’ve been reading the daily stoic by Ryan holiday on the kindle app in the morning it's only a
small dose of reading it's literally two pages takes less than five minutes my plan here was to trick
my brain into thinking well I’ve already read something today so I might as well read a little bit
more and it's actually been working it's actually been working I can justify later in the day to ignore
my social media and just pick up a book and read a few pages instead
so when i read a book if it was any good Build an archive of your books I always feel like inspired
to try and implement what this book has taught me but then a couple of weeks go by and I’ve
literally forgotten everything that it taught me this is where the kindle comes in so I can highlight
parts that have resonated with me and store them to refer back to I tried to summarize them into a
notion page but this was too much extra work and I ended up not really sticking to it so instead I’ve
been using this website called read wise and it'll basically send you five kindle highlights and just
remind you of your favorite principles from the books you've read so this has actually been working
really well over the last few weeks so read wise has helped me to create a perpetual cycle where
I’ll read a book highlight the best bits and then get daily email reminders of those bits and that then
encourages me to read more the only mistake I made on my kindle was getting creative books you
see if you read a book like this on kindle you lose literally half the experience because it's so visual
the final habit that I’ve been trying to Set reading times implement is to set reading times so every
night before bed I’ll read something and I’ve told myself it doesn't have to be for hours it could just
be a few pages but at least read something this one's actually been quite hard to stick to when I’m
tired I just I cannot be bothered so some days I’ve given myself a break but most days I’ve been
sticking to it and it's been working really well those are my three habits start small make an archive
of what you've learned and actually read it and set reading times but this is only the start I’m also
going to use this channel to help keep me accountable I’m going to make a book review of the best
book I’ve read each month so if you don't see those book reviews tell me to sort my life out because
I need to make them.
 Rita Carter. Why reading matters.
The Power of Reading
If I came and told you there is this one thing you could all do which would make you more
imaginative, make your memory better, probably improve your personal relationships, and make
you a nicer person, you would probably be very skeptical. And even more so if I said it costs
nothing and probably everybody in this room can already do it.
Now, you will probably have guessed by now that I’m talking about reading – there’s a clue in the
title. But I’m not talking about the sort of reading that we all know is incredibly important; that is,
the sort of reading we do for education, the sort of reading we do for administration, the sort of
reading which we have to do nowadays just to get through life.
I’m talking rather about fiction, stories, narratives – the sort of reading where you are reading
things from inside another person’s head, where it takes you right inside the character’s emotions
and feelings and actions so you are seeing it from their perspective. That’s the sort of reading which
is at best thought of as pleasurable and at worst quite often as a waste of time.
I mean, I remember my mother telling me that when she was a child she was crazy about books but
that her father once ripped a novel out of her hands, saying that “If you have to read, at least read
something useful.” What I want to tell you today is that, surprisingly, fiction is very useful indeed,
in ways that we probably never previously suspected. In fact, it’s more important, probably, than
any other form of reading.
The Impact of Fiction
And I have some new evidence, which comes rather surprisingly out of the brain sciences, to
support that, which I’ll come to. First of all, some not-so-new evidence: in 2013 there was a series
of experiments done by two New York psychologists, David Kidd and Emanuele Castano. What
they did was take people and ask them to read quite short passages from various types of books.
Some of them were nonfiction books, explanatory or learning books, and some of them where
thrillers, plots, where you read about the events happening in a story but not very much about the
people; you weren’t inside their heads.
And the third sort was the sort of fiction I am talking about, which is when you were reading things
from the perspective of the characters. After that, the researchers got the people to look at a series of
photographs of people with very strong facial expressions of one sort or another, and they were
asked to judge from the expressions alone what they thought was going on inside those people’s
heads.
This is actually quite a standard test for something that we call “Theory of Mind,” which is a
rather bad phrase, I think, for a faculty which we’re all, I hope, pretty familiar with; we’ve all got it
to some extent or another. And that is the intuitive ability to see from the way a person is moving or
expressing themselves what is going on in their head.
The Power of Empathy
It allows us to, just at least for a moment, to step outside our own heads and see the world for a bit
from other people’s point of view. And the same faculty, by extension, opens up whole worlds to us
because it allows us to imagine what it’s like to be somewhere else, doing something else, seeing it
in a different way. And thus people who don’t have it are quite severely handicapped, particularly in
social life – they find relationships very difficult. And more than that, they are limited by a very
limited imagination. Because without that ability to step outside yourself, it’s difficult to
imagine anything, really.
Now, you don’t actually have to look at academic papers to see this effect. We’re all quite familiar
with it. I want to tell you about a particular – A few years ago, I went to a reading group which was
for people with various types of mental issues. A lot of them had had severe depression or anxiety,
and they had come together to start a reading group. And I joined several months in, when it was
already having effect.
A Life-Changing Book Club
The particular meeting I went to they were reading “Wuthering Heights,” the English novel, and I
just got to this bit where Kathy, the heroine, had to decide between marrying either boring old
Linton or this wildly exciting tempestuous chap, Heathcliff. So I just want you to see what they had
to say.
“Every Linton on the face of the earth might melt into nothing before I could consent to forsake
Heathcliff.” “Stop there, Faye. Is this sort of state she’s in something you’d aspire to? Would you
like to be feeling what Katherine’s feeling?” “Definitely!” “I want to feel it all the time, and I felt
like that, you know, happy nearly all the time, and it can last for weeks, months.”
“It’s a beautiful idea: one moment she’s like ‘I am Heathcliff’, and then you get the sense that it
could be very, you know, dangerous as well.” “She’s marrying someone under false pretenses.” “I
could imagine it then from Linton’s point of view. Imagine marrying Katherine but then knowing
she’s in love with somebody else. And he will, he will find out.” “I think deep down she should be
with Heathcliff.” “I think in one way she’s sexually attracted to him, and the passion.” “Yeah.”
“Yes.” “And I think she should go for it.”
It did seem to me as I watched and listened to those people that this quite simple act of reading
fiction had really changed their lives; and in fact, in one case it actually saved a life. I know that –
as you will probably see in the end, I’ll come to it.
The Neuroscience of Reading
Now, the question that occurred to me was, “What on Earth is happening in people’s brains to have
this rather profound effect, this pastime?” So I just want to go a little bit over what is happening in
the brain. You probably know that our brains are made up of neurons, electrical cells, and that they
join together to form pathways, which have electricity zapping back and forth endlessly, and that
electricity ebb and flow is our thoughts, our emotions, and our feelings.
Some of these pathways are pretty similar in all of us because they’re actually built into our genes.
Up here, on the left here, they’re the pathways we all have which take light from the eyes to the
visual cortex, so the back of our head. On the other side of the frame, you have got the connections
between the two hemispheres of the brain so that each side quite literally knows what the other is
doing.
Now, I just want to show you quickly the difference between speaking and reading because they are
very different. Speaking is something that, again, is in our genes, we already have those pathways
wired into us when we are born. All you have to do is put a baby around people who are talking and
sooner or later they will start to do it too, it’s natural.
But reading is not. You could put a baby in a library, surrounded by books, from the day it’s born,
and it would never start spontaneously reading. It has to be taught how to do it. And this is the
reason speech has been with us for at least 100,000 years, quite time for natural selection to actually
get it wired into our brains. But reading probably only started about 5,000 years ago, and until about
100 years ago, most people didn’t do it at all.
The Complexity of Reading
So rather than being able to use those pre-wired, intuitive, if you like, pathways, every time, every
person who learns to read has to do it afresh. And that means making new pathways, individual
pathways, the sort that individuals do make all through their life. Every time they have an
experience will lay down a memory or a new habit; they create individual pathways, on top of the
basic blueprint. And that’s what we have to do when we read.
Quickly, when you look at a brain that’s speaking, it’s fairly straightforward: if you see a dog, say.
Information zooms to the back of the head, visual cortex, then sort of chunks forward. As it chunks
forward, it picks up memories of what it’s looking at until by the time it gets to that blue area,
which is the first of the major language areas, it is then able to put a word to it. And then it gets
jogged on again to that next red area, Broca’s, and that’s when we remember how to say it.
Quite literally, the motor area, which is that green stripe, is then instructed to send instructions to
our lips and our tongues to actually make the word. That’s how speaking works. And, as I say, it’s
natural, those pathways are there already. But reading is a very different kettle of fish.
The Brain at Work During Reading
When we see abstract symbols written down, our brain has to do far more work. It actually has to,
when we are learning to read, we have to create all those new connections in many, many different
parts of the brain. You can see the red bits, or the lit-up bits. You can see these aren’t clear, easy,
one-trap pathways.
These are really complicated networks that are being formed in the brain when we read. So your
brain is doing a lot more work, it’s connecting far more parts. If you like, it’s a more holistic
experience. It forces you to use parts of the brain that aren’t usually used.
Reading and Experiencing
More than that, the reason, or one reason why it’s so widespread, is that when we read things about
somebody doing something, run for their life or they’re screaming or they’re frightened, what
happens in the brain of the reader is that those same bits of the brain that would be active if they
were doing it themselves, become active. Admittedly not quite to the same extent, or we’d act out
everything we read, and we can usually inhibit them enough not to do that, but basically – These are
brain scans of people, you can see from the color chart below, they’re reading.
The actual movement produces the pattern on your left, and when you’re reading it, what is
happening in your brain is the pattern on the right. And as you see, they are very similar, with the
only difference being that when you’re reading about things, it’s not quite as intense.
The Power of Empathy Through Reading
If it carried on in intensity, you would act it out. Because the important thing about reading is that
you’re not just learning what’s going on in that person’s head. You, too, to a certain extent are
experiencing it. And there’s a very big difference there.
With pain – if watch or read about somebody in pain, the same bits of the brain that would be active
if you were feeling the pain will become active as well. And some people feel this so much that they
actually do feel and report the pain. Same with anger, same with any emotion, same even with quite
complicated intellectual things, like judgments, moral judgments, and so on.
The Impact of Reading on the Brain
Now, this is the new information which has really only come out this year. Some researchers from
Emory University in the States decided to see if they could actually see inside the brain what was
going on. We know already from the earlier work that people become at least temporarily more
sensitive to other people’s feelings once they’ve read a book or been reading some fiction. And this
researchers set out to see if this was something that could actually be seen inside of the brain,
physically.
So they had students, lots and lots, I think it was quite a large sample, reading a passage of a
particularly engaging and exciting novel with a lot of inside-character driven stuff. It was actually
‘Pompeii’, by Robert Harris, if you want to do the same thing yourself. And they had the people
read just 30 pages a night for five nights in a row. And they took brain scans before the people
started doing this exercise to get a baseline of what their brains looked like before.
Then they had them read, and every night after they had read a passage, they came in next morning
and they had their brain scanned again. And every day there were differences. The differences, this
is a sort of schematic picture of where the differences were found, the connections, which as the
week went on and they read a passage each night, they got thicker and denser. And they are, as you
see, all over the brain, not just in the language areas, everywhere.
Conclusion: The Transformative Power of Reading Fiction
Basically, what these people seemed to be doing was giving themselves a really good workout. In
fact, the brain scans looked more or less what you’d expect to find if these people had lived the
events that they had been reading about. They had actually lived an experience, and it had become
part of the architecture of their brain. So in conclusion, I’m really giving the same message, I think,
as Delia, the speaker before, which is that your brain needs a workout as much as your body.
And reading fiction seems to be one of the best workouts you can get. And not only is it good for
you, but it’s also good for society as a whole because the brain is like a muscle: the more you force
yourself through books to take other people’s perspectives, to sympathize, to empathize with other
people, the more empathetic a society we will have. Thank you.