Harry Potter, but your brain acts as if
it is. And the more parts of your brain
that get a workout, the better it is for
your overall cognitive performance.
That said, not all reading is creat-
ed equal. Preliminary results from a
study conducted at Stanford Univer-
sity indicate that close literary read-
ing in particular gives your brain a
major workout. MRI scans of people
who are deep into a Jane Austen
novel showed an increase in blood
f lowing to areas of the brain that
control both cognitive and executive
function, as opposed to the more
limited effects that come from more
leisurely reading.
What if you are (or someone you
know is) a poor, or even a dyslexic,
reader who feels as if you’ll never be
able to read enough to reap these
benefits? A book can fix that prob-
lem, too. Scientists at Carnegie
Mellon University studied children
aged eight to ten who were below-
average readers. One hundred hours
of remedial reading classes signifi-
cantly improved the quality of their
brains’ white matter – the tissue
that carries signals between areas
of grey matter, where information is
processed. The researchers’ conclu-
sion: the brains of these children had
begun to rewire themselves in ways
that could benefit the entire brain,
not only the reading-centric temporal
cortex.
The ability to read closely is some-
thing that needs to be nurtured. In
her new book, Reader, Come Home,
Wolf notes that even she, as someone
who reads for a living, has found her
ability to concentrate on the written
word fading as more of what we read
is on a digital screen. “Unfortunately,
this form of reading is rarely continu-
ous, sustained or concentrated,” she
writes. That sets up a vicious cycle:
without the sustained exercise of our
reading ‘muscles’, the brain loses its
ability to control the intricate pro-
cesses that allow us to read deeply.
Of course, there’s an easy solution:
Turn off your phone and your com-
puter, set aside a good hour or two –
and just read.Expression Origin: ‘Barking Up The Wrong Tree’
Meaning:To have misguided thoughts about an event or situation,
a false lead.Origin:This refers to hunting dogs that may have chased their prey
up a tree. The dogs bark, assuming that the prey is still in the tree,
when the prey is no longer there.
anais john, from http://www.grammarly.com136 august 2019
READER’S DIGEST