Reading changes our view of our own path through life
Brent Jones
Reading is an activity that refuels and rewires the brain. Reading fiction books teaches you to live in a world of characters and travel to new places. Reading a non-fiction book opens your mind to new insights from individual wells of knowledge that can make your life better.
Reading expands the mind and gives you more ideas because you draw from various experiences. It keeps your minds young, healthy, and sharp, with studies showing that reading can help prevent Alzheimer's disease. Reading every day may reduce dementia risk, according to a study published in JAMA Psychiatry in July 2018.
Gaining more exposure to vocabulary through reading leads to higher scores on reading tests and general intelligence tests for children.
Through reading, we meet new people and go to new places, leading to our reinventing ourselves. Some benefits of reading are:
improves brain connectivity.
increases your vocabulary and comprehension.
empowers you to empathize with other people.
aids in sleep readiness.
reduces stress.
lowers blood pressure and heart rate.
fights depression symptoms.
prevents cognitive decline as you age.
Anna Quindlen's book, How Reading Changed My Life, values the comforting premise that readers are never alone. "There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books," she writes, "a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but never really a stranger.
What is clear is that reading changes us and changes our life.