The Footprints That Books Leave On Your Brain

People who read books will know the feeling that I will present below. Reading a book goes beyond reading it. It involves immersion in another world, a translation to another era. You forget everything around you, you immerse yourself in another world. Your eagerness to read until the end grows and when that end comes you feel a bit of sadness and fullness at the same time.

These sensations go further. Why is reading so important? Does it have any effect on our brain?

Here we will find out!

Books and the brain

When we read a book the brain is stimulated. The visual attention, the imagination, the emotions that it can cause us, all this causes a positive mental exercise that enriches our mind.

But, this only happens with good books or, what is the same, good writing. In fact, authors of  Metaphors We Live By  such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson examined the power metaphors had on the minds of individuals. These have the power to activate different areas of our consciousness due to their meaning.

Not all people imagine the same, and this is a very important and interesting fact. The content of the same book read by two people can be visualized or imagined in very different ways.

What does this depend on? Of the personality, of the person himself, of his character but, above all, because it is very difficult for all of us to imagine in the same way. I will not visualize this character in the same way that you do. Simply because our mind works differently.

Characters and empathy

How many times have we put ourselves in the shoes of the character we read? In addition to being able to visualize them in a way and get an idea of ​​them, we managed to empathize with them. In this way, many times we feel in agreement with how the character feels.

Thanks to this, we achieve an improvement in our intuition and knowledge of our environment, allowing us to better understand the emotional signals of others. We must not forget that they are fictional characters, that they do not exist. But in our mind we make them real, we shape both them and the places that are described to us.

That is why we feel a feeling of sadness and emptiness when finishing a book. Because we make the characters in the books our friends. We follow them in their history and we feel the same as them.

Modification of our behavior

Reading helps us to understand the world and also to see other points of view. Obviously it is fiction, but there are many teachings hidden in books that we can learn from.

In addition to developing our empathy, books make us more understanding people and with greater capacities to understand others. In other words, we learn how to deal with certain situations from what we have read.

Put a book in your life

As we have seen, books help us better understand the world and empathize with others. They influence us in a positive way that is also beneficial to us in our daily lives.

There are many possibilities to read today. We have the paper book, the electronic book … in addition to various topics that can call us more or less depending on how we are or what we are looking for or needing. I remember the testimony of a colleague who said how a book with a sad theme had helped her at a bad moment in her life.

How is this possible? Perhaps she felt identified and was able to observe how she really was not so bad, that there were worse situations and moments. Reading other people’s misfortunes helped him, it was positive.

These and other things can happen to us. Why when we are sad we watch a movie that makes us cry? Well, for the pain to flow and we “free” ourselves in some way. Well, the same thing happens with books, but with a plus: it allows us to imagine and create.