Reading a book is a multisensory experience. A book bombards our brain with sights, smells, sounds, voices and textures. We come across scenes we have never seen before and meet people we have never met before. Sometimes we collide into new concepts and previously unknown facts. We learn to deal with different circumstances and express a wide range of emotions. Whilst immersed in a book, we explore a brand-new world or find ourselves drifting in an old world of ours. We gaze at the party of ocean waves and at the clusters of stars from a distant point of view, witnessing the story happening.
There is a plethora of details to grasp and learn from the reading of a book. Vocabulary, concepts, quotes, story ideas, references, scene images, characters and more. When organizing our brain after reading a book, eidetic memory helps. Cultivating an eidetic memory enables us to recall these details in the form of photographic screenshots. Storing our information in categories also helps.
Similar to the categorical organization there is a system called Zettelkasten method. In this method, one stores the information collected from the reading of the book into subject headings, tags or numbers by using index cards or slips. Tiago Forte’s second brain method is also a functional method.
Another interesting method to record your reading experiences is Blurting method. As the name suggests, once you complete the reading of the book, you take a notebook and blurt out all the information you can about your reading of the book. This, I think, not only stores the collected information but also enables us to exercise our brain and instill this information deeper into our subconscious. By writing it all down, we make it retrievable for the future. We learn new things and we visualize whip-smart systems.
In addition to the bombardment of information, there is another aspect of reading a book. Reading a book launches a cocktail of hormones inside our body, altering our brain chemistry. While flipping pages, we feel trust and empathy, it boosts the oxytocin hormone and on the other side, a good story boosts the happiness hormone dopamine.
Just as a good emotional song offers us warmth in the cold, a good book stirs the rich menagerie of our emotions, adding to the flamboyant cornucopia of our archetypal psyche. Reading doesn’t only bestow us with a detective mind, it also teaches us how to jump out of love triangles, while also tightening the underpinnings and bolts of our knowledge-stippling subconscious caboose.
Reading is fun. And entertaining. But it is also a workout. An exercise that improves the overall quality and expanse of our mind. A good library is all that we humans need, I believe, apart from good food and nature.
I usually
like to read fiction over non-fiction, but for all the books that I read, I
post my reviews on Goodreads. So, if you too are an avid reader, let’s connect!
Comments
Post a Comment