The act of reading begins with attention. We must disengage from whatever else we're doing, pull our focus to the text and zero in on the words.
The reading brain then has three jobs to do.
Expert readers have trained their brains to decode text nearly automatically, freeing up bandwidth to explore meaning and prioritise what's of value.
How the reading brain probes a text for meaning depends on the individual's quality of attention, background knowledge and ability to hypothesize, as well as our life experience.
This is why we can read something at 25 and again at 40 and have two completely different experiences of the text. These variations are reflections of how we emotionally respond to our comprehension: what we empathize with, what motivates us, makes us laugh, fear, or question.
Our ability to read and write, to document and share knowledge across time and space, has had a profound impact on every aspect of human life. As Wolf writes: "Literacy made it unnecessary to reinvent the wheel."
Researchers have shown how reading improves our intelligence, our memory, makes us more creative and more empathetic.
When we read a story, our brain reacts to the narrative in the same way it would if we were experiencing the events first-hand, thanks to the limbic system. This is why storytelling is such a powerful vehicle for influence. A story is far more likely to deepen empathy and change behavior than a fact.
One reason for this is the brain's automatic visualisation of what we're reading. "By creating mental images from the words on a page or screen," writes psychologist Donna Wilson, "we tap into both the verbal and visual-spatial representational systems, making abstract concepts more concrete and thus more meaningful and memorable."
Metaphors alone can be more effective at stimulating activity in the limbic system than literal sentences, whether part of a story or not. Researchers from Princeton have even shown how words relating to taste, such as a person described as "sweet" or an argument "bitter", not only activate the emotional brain more, but also the areas responsible for the physical act of tasting. We can taste, hear and see what we read.
