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Reading (and Writing) Is All About Human Connection

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Reading (and Writing) Is All About Human Connection

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This exploratory source says that reading connects people and develops empathy by allowing people to share and interact with each other's thoughts.

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I've spent 7,300 hours of my life reading - this is why.

Photo by author

The written word has always been special to me. I've been an avid reader most of my life - by avid, I mean I've probably averaged over an hour a day since I was 13 (and that's just books, not including newspapers or other articles). It's part of my identity, and it's essential to my survival. If I ever signed up for Alone, I'd have to take a book as one of my 13 items. Lately, I've started writing, which has made me think more about the relationship between the reader and writer.

What I love about reading is the way it shares an interior world. The writer can share a thought, a feeling, a wish, a need, a smell, a story, a moment. They can be entirely made-up, but if they exist for the author, they exist for me. It's a tiny brain transplant. Writer, I understand you. I get it.

In the modern world where genuine connections seem so hard to find, reading and writing is a way to feel a deep connection with someone in a unique way.

It's a bridging of the gap between my mind and your mind. It's as close to Being John Malkovich as we'll ever get. We're all travelling through this world in our own heads, intrinsically alone in our unique experiences of life. And then - through the magic of 26 characters and punctuation - I can receive a writer's thoughts into my own.

Writing vs speaking
Of course, you can connect with people through conversation - and the expressions, gestures and tones add extra meaning - but there's two benefits to writing over speaking. One is that you can go as deep as you want as quickly as you want, and the other is you have time for consideration.

If you got chatting to someone new in real life, the conversation would likely be fairly surface-level. It takes time to build a level of trust where you can talk about the things that you lay in bed thinking about at 3am. This is why alcohol can be great for building connections. Booze helps people talk about their real thoughts and feelings without the inhibition of worrying about social norms and acceptance. When you write something, you can go straight to 3am level. Instant slightly-drunk connection.

It can be liberating to share your strongest feelings and deepest thoughts. It's also scary - there's always that lurking fear of rejection. When publishing online, our writing can reach far corners of humanity, and we have no idea how it'll be received. I'm sure there's the author's equivalent of a hungover ' oh god, what did I say last night ' feeling. Not having the real-time feedback of conversation can lead us unchecked down a flawed path.

But the other benefit of written words is their consideration. Through editing, the message and meaning can be clarified and distilled to its most powerful form.

I know when I write, there's much more that the surface level of meaning. I guess this is what my English teacher at school was trying to explain - a writer is saying more than just the words on the page. They're making comments on memory, culture, and our human needs and desires. Their stories critique our experience of love, fear, loneliness, beauty, strength, and weakness. They're drawing on larger thoughts than just those they're writing about.

I think of a piece of writing like a flower that blooms on the tree of human experience. It can take years of growing roots and branches, absorbing the oxygen and nutrients of the space around. The tree cycles through the seasons of growth and decay. Finally, when the conditions are right, it produces the story - a flower that says 'Come here. I have something for you.'

Fiction and empathy
A writer creates a world you can live in, a language you can speak, a mindset you can inhabit. This explains why readers have more empathy - they have come as close to living other people's lives as it's possible to.

Many of my favourite books I can't bring myself to read again, because they were shattering experiences. We Need to Talk About Kevin made me feel what it's like for a mother's (unconditional) love to be undeserved. The Death of Bunny Monroe made me feel what it's like to be driven by carnal forces rather than humanity towards others. The Choke made me feel what it's like to be a powerless child in an adult's world. These are worlds I can't experience anywhere else. These books made me cry. (And not just a little bit. I was once reading on a train and had to take breaks between each sentence or become a complete emotional wreck in public.)

All creative work (movies, theatre, music, dance, art) has the power to move us and tell a story, but reading has a special force by being created in your own mind. It feels less like watching someone having an experience, and more like you are experiencing it yourself.

Non-fiction and meaning
My bookshelf contains more fiction than non-fiction books, but I'll pretty much read everything. The non-fiction books that stay with me come from the perspective of human experience. I love the books that can turn your whole perspective of society on its head. They can take global trends and show how it stems from individuals - and how it effects individuals.

Atul Gawande fundamentally changed how I view the end of life experience when I read Being Mortal. He writes frankly about the different needs of the medical profession, people who are dying, and the people who love them. Chasing The Scream showed me how the law does not always protect, sometimes it destroys. See What You Made Me Do made me consider the societal undercurrents running through all intimate relationships.

While these books are based on facts - statistics, interviews, and other research - the author is also sharing their journey of revelation. The facts provide the structure. The author's values, experiences, and personal voice flesh it out with meaning. Data has no value without meaning, and that requires interpretation which comes from our own experiences.

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Writing without experience
I recently read this article about GPT-3, a natural language processing algorithm. It's a machine-learning technology which 'ate' the internet and can now produce paragraphs of text that are grammatically and contextually correct. The results are a fascinating insight into the way we talk about ourselves and each other, but the writing clearly lacks something. For example, when Philosopher AI was prompted with 'my happiest memory':

"There are several memories that I hold near and dear to my heart. The memories of my childhood are always the most vivid. I remember playing with my mother and father, brother and sister... My family never had much money, so we did not have any toys that were manufactured; it was all home-made stuff."

You can read a whole article in the Guardian written by the GPT-3 technology.

It can describe things a human would describe, but it feels like there's a layer missing. The writing is hollow and unconvincing. The technology is trying to create the flower without the tree, resulting in something slightly deformed. The words are there, but they lack the meaning created through human experience. There's no human connection. There's no mind to climb into.

Writers, get real
Reading has connected me with people who died a century before I was born. It's made my work commute an experience leading an Antarctic expedition, or fleeing a French penal colony. Reading got me through a week in bed with chicken pox. (I read the Lord of the Rings trilogy non-stop and emerged pox-scarred and with trouble speaking in non-middle-earth English.) I see these as gifts from the writers (and editors and publishers) that created those books.

So, writers: There are readers out there who want to experience what you've lived, want to feel what you're feeling. It doesn't have to be autobiographical - but it does have to have meaning. Whatever meaning you've created from your unique human experience. Tell us about it. Don't be afraid to let readers climb into your mind for a little while.

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Reading (and Writing) Is All About Human Connection.

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The written word has always been special to me. I've been an avid reader most of my life - by avid, I mean I've probably averaged over an hour a day since I was 13 (and that's just books, not...

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This exploratory source says that in an increasingly-polarized U.S.A, people are attempting to bring politics into education, such as by influencing school board races and banning books.

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This exploratory source says that as book banning efforts continue, people with opposing viewpoints, such as the right and the left, are pitted against each other.

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Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools

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Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools

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This exploratory source says that book bans are reaching some of the highest numbers in recent times, but people are also uniting to fight those bans.

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Book Bans Continue to Surge in Public Schools

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More books were removed during the first half of this academic year than in the entire previous one.

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Don't Avoid Controversial Literature: Your Students' Psychological Health Depends on It

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Don't Avoid Controversial Literature: Your Students' Psychological Health Depends on It

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This scholarly source says that controversial literature is important to students' social and emotional development because of the exposure it provides to other cultures and viewpoints.

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Confronting Book Banning and Assumed Curricular Neutrality: A Critical Inquiry Framework

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Confronting Book Banning and Assumed Curricular Neutrality: A Critical Inquiry Framework

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This scholarly source talks about how book banning generally targets books about the minority experience and leads to a lack of diversity, and proposes a critical inquiry framework to teach students how to read those texts.

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This is a scholarly source that talks about how the books being banned today are frequently about race or the LGBTQ+ community, and how books are essential to understanding others.

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How Literature--Yes, Literature--Can Help you Better Connect with Others

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How Literature--Yes, Literature--Can Help you Better Connect with Others

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This exploratory sources says that literature helps with the development of empathy and imagination, and helps reduce racial bias.

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How literature — yes, literature — can help you better connect with others

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What is literature good for? Plenty — it increases our ability to “read” other people, lights up multiple parts of our brain and can even help reduce bias, says poet and creative …

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As Book Bans Soar, Students Are Joining the Fight Against Censorship

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As Book Bans Soar, Students Are Joining the Fight Against Censorship

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This exploratory source says that students are learning to become advocates for their beliefs and communities in their efforts to stop book banning.

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Gregg Richards

When a wave of book bans began sweeping the country, the Brooklyn Public Library fought back. It made the titles available online to students everywhere. Since April, its Books Unbanned program has gotten 6,000 requests for digital library cards from teenagers in all 50 states.

Now the library is teaming up with PEN America, a nonprofit organization focused on free expression in literature, to bring the battle over censorship to the students' hometowns. A new series of virtual sessions, the Freedom to Read Advocacy Institute, will teach teenagers how to defend the books in their schools, libraries and communities.

Among the panelists will be activists like Jack Petocz, an 18-year-old student at Flagler-Palm Coast High School in Florida, who fought the removal of George M. Johnson's "All Boys Aren't Blue" from his school district's libraries. Many of the targeted books are, like "All Boys Aren't Blue," about the LGBTQ communities and race and racism.

"In one of the darkest blips of Florida, I made a difference," said Petocz, a mobilization coordinator for Gen-Z for Change. "They can as well."

On the agenda: the history of book bans, the rights they have as students, how the First Amendment applies to school libraries and the actions they can take. They will hear from Ashley Hope Perez, the author of one of the most often targeted titles, "Out of Darkness," Reshama Sanjuani, founder of Girls Who Code, and Jen Cousins, the co-founder of the Florida Freedom to Read Project.
The Freedom to Read Advocacy Institute
What: A free, online series open to high school students across the country. Join the waitlist here

When: Four Thursdays in February beginning Feb. 2

Why: To teach students how to combat censorship in their schools and libraries

Summer Boismier, a former Oklahoma high school English teacher, helped to develop the session on opposing what are frequently orchestrated campaigns to remove books. Boismier, who now works at the Brooklyn Public Library, wants to show students how to use school policies to their advantage.

"They know this is wrong," she said. "But they don't always know how to push back, how, for example, to effectively engage with your school board, where to find the information that you need to do that, how to access school policies around challenged materials, libraries and classroom libraries."

At the beginning of the current school year, Boismier said she was told to cover up the books in her classroom library in the Norman, Oklahoma, public schools after the state passed a law regulating what could be taught about race and sex. She complied but added these words, "Books the State Doesn't Want You to Read," and included the QR code to the Brooklyn Public Library's Books Unbanned web site. She was suspended after nearly a decade of teaching and then resigned.

According to the American Library Association, the five most frequently challenged books in 2021 were Maia Kobabe's "Gender Queer," "Lawn Boy" by Jonathan Evison, "All Boys Aren't Blue," "Out of Darkness" and "The Hate U Give" by Angie Thomas. All tackle LGBTQ topics or issues of race and racism.

"This is really about lives, whose lives get to count, and which identities are quote, unquote acceptable," Boismier said.

"Laws like what Oklahoma has on the books, laws like Florida is currently going viral for, they treat every student with a book as inherently suspicious."

At the Brooklyn Public Library, librarian Karen Keys works with teenagers and young adults who told the library that they needed help in fighting book bans. They want to know how to sign up to speak at a school board meeting, how to prepare a speech, how to write letters to the editor and how to get the word out to their fellow students, she said.

"More than anything they just want to understand why this happens and what the motivations for it are," Keys said.

What she became a librarian in 2007, she was not as worried about challenges to books even as libraries drew attention to censorship during Banned Books Week.

"It didn't have the same force," she said. "It didn't feel as important. It was just a way to send the message, 'You have the right to read whatever you want to read.' It didn't feel as tied to current events and what was going on. There have always been book bans and book challenges but it's just at an unprecedented rate right now."

The Freedom to Read Advocacy Institute is meant to prepare teens to be warriors in the fight against book challenges," Keys said. The hope is to have a cohort of free expression advocates to combat book banning.

"This isn't entirely about the books," Keys said. "It's about attacking people you don't agree with."

În September, PEN America released a report showing that during the previous school year, 1,648 books in more than 5,000 schools were banned, more than in any previous year. Texas banned more books that any other state with 801 titles, followed by Florida with 566.

Of the books, 41% had LGBTQ themes or main characters, while 40% featured main characters of color.

The recent attempts to censor books are often led by conservative advocacy groups. What began as modest school-level efforts remove books at the start of the 2021-2022 school year became a full-fledged social and political movement originated by not only local groups by also by state and national ones, according to PEN. It has identified at least 50 groups involved in books bans.

Parents who have challenged books argue that schools should value their opinions. They say they are preserving their parental rights over what their children read and should have a say in what their children are taught.

They call some of the books pornographic or obscene and say they cover topics not suitable for the children's ages. The books present radical ideologies inappropriate for their schools that indoctrinate students in viewpoints at odds with the country, they say.

"We all can agree that parents deserve to and are entitled to a say over their kids' education," Suzanne Nossel, the head of PEN America, said in September. "That's absolutely essential. But fundamentally, that is not what this is about when parents are mobilized in an orchestrated campaign to intimidate teachers and librarians to dictate that certain books be pulled off shelves even before they've been read or reviewed."

Petocz, who was the honoree for the 2022 PEN/Benenson Courage Award, was suspended from school in March after organizing a statewide student walk-out in protest of Florida's "Don't Say Gay" law. That law dictates how public school teachers address gender identify or sexual orientation in classrooms. Instruction may not occur in kindergarten through the third grade or in a way that is not age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students in accordance with state standards.

Courtesy of Jack Petocz

As he fought for "All Boys Aren't Blue" to remain available in his district, "My friends and I were met with name-calling, insults from government officials, and threats from individuals belonging to hate groups," he said. "In the end, this resistance just made our comradery and pursuit to fight stronger. It revealed those who truly support this kind of book banning."

Jonathan Friedman, who directs PEN America's free expression and education programs, said the first Freedom to Read Advocacy Institute was intended as a pilot program with the potential to develop additional ones.

"I think that the fight for public education is becoming a fight that many young people are eager and hungry to engage in, particularly as the spread censorship is reaching further into their lives," he said.

The current wave of censorship is more significant than past ones, partly because of the publicity afforded by the internet and partly by the number of politicians participating in efforts to ban books. The effort is frequently partisan.

In Texas, for example, former Republican state Rep. Matt Krause produced a list of 850 titles dealing with racism or sexuality that could "make students feel discomfort." He wanted schools districts in the state to determine whether the books were in their libraries.

League City, outside of Houston, created a "community standards review committee" to review challenged books and decide if they should be restricted from minors or removed from the city's library.

Florida now requires a certified media specialist to approve of all books available in school classrooms and threatens teachers with felony violations.

"You have people in elected positions who are basically using those positions to control and determine the availability of information for everybody," Friedman said.

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'They Know This is Wrong': Online Course Teaches Students How to Defend Banned Books

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The Brooklyn Public Library is teaming up with a nonprofit to teach teens how to defend the books in their schools, libraries and communities.

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Library Book Ban Attempts are at an All-Time High. These Librarians are Fighting Back.

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Library Book Ban Attempts are at an All-Time High. These Librarians are Fighting Back.

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This exploratory source talks about how book banning targets subjects deemed "inappropriate" for children and how librarians are facing consequences for refusing to stop offering those books.

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Library book ban attempts are at an all-time high. These librarians are fighting back

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More than 4,000 library book bans were attempted in public and school libraries in 2023, according to the American Library Association. Six librarians share how they’ve responded in their communities.

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The Experiences We Share: Literature Shows the Human Connection

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The Experiences We Share: Literature Shows the Human Connection

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This exploratory source says that literature is important to helping people to understand how humans are connected, even if we may seem to come from entirely different backgrounds on the surface.

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Part of being human means that we share a common experience of what it means to be a part of humanity. This common body of experience is known as the human condition. Literature comprises written works of the imagination that offer its readers a constellation of glimpses of this human condition.

To obtain an academic perspective on how literature describes the condition in which humans find themselves, as well as other ways literature relates to its readers, The Telescope interviewed Professor Leanne Maunu, Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Humanities and Reading at Palomar College.

Professor Leanne Maunu

So, the question is, what does literature teach us about the human condition?

Maunu believes literature is instructive in helping us to see how we as humans are interconnected. "[Literature] teaches us that we are connected through the experiences we share-that others have gone through the same things we have," Maunu said.

Situations in which humans are placed, as well as those in which they place themselves, appear in literature in a way that the reader can recognize. This experience of what it feels like to be the character one is reading about is known as a vicarious experience.

Through partaking in the lives of characters vicariously, "Literature can be a touchstone for us to see how others have responded to certain situations," said Maunu. In this way, Maunu believes we can develop our values.

"When we read about other people's experiences, we can put ourselves in their shoes and envision what other people experience," Maunu said.

Maunu believes humans have an intrinsic need to read stories. "Humans have always told stories, even when they passed them down orally. I think we're drawn to listening to and reading stories because we have so much to learn from others."

Since humans have always told stories, it is important to look at the language in which stories were told in the past.

"Learning the history of words helps the reader learn that words have a lot of different meanings," Maunu said. By looking at a word's history, the reader of literature comes to learn what is new about a word and how this meaning is different from the way the word was used in the former days.

Knowing history in general and more specifically the history of language helps us to know how language evolves. Maunu believes in the importance of knowing that language is flexible.

"Shakespeare invented so many words that didn't exist," Maunu said. "We need to understand that language can change. Dr. Johnson, who invented the first dictionary, tried to fix the language, but language never really is fixed. Language is fluid and always evolving,"

Understanding what past authors wrote helps readers of literature see what can be done with language. "By studying literature, the reader can see what is possible in the expression of ideas, which in turn helps them learn what is possible to express in their own ideas," Maunu said.

Maunu believes opening up literature opens up new worlds to readers. She finds value in looking at historical words to see what happened in the past. And learning these past lessons helps us understand the modern world.

"Reading literature helps us to see how past authors grappled with the big questions and great concerns," she said, "allowing us to see other people's experiences and points of view."

"Reading literature is also very important because doing so helps us increase our empathy for others."

Empathy has become the subject of neuroscience since the early 2000s after it was discovered that the human brain has special nerve cells known as mirror neurons that react when a person perceives others interacting or experiencing emotions.

According to a 2013 study done by professors Sourya Acharya and Samarth Shukla, "Mirror neurons fire in the same way when we actually recreate that action ourselves." Humans develop these neurons when they see people communicating, which includes characters communicating in literature.

Through reading literature, we experience another's point of view along with possible accompanying emotions. Since we experience these emotions as our own through the activation of mirror neurons, we come to understand and share the feelings of the characters in literature because we have cognitively experienced them vicariously.

Because emotions frequently felt tend to recur across a range of related experiences, the empathic emotions felt when we witness communication in literature can be reawakened in us when witnessing similar communication in our personal life. In this way empathy gained through literature translates into empathy for beings in our own lived experiences.

Additional evidence that reading literature can develop empathy in readers has been increasingly evident across a range of studies correlating the reading of literature with empathy.

An experiment published in 2005 in the Science Direct journal found that readers familiar with the work of well-known literary authors score high on tests for empathy.

Another study in Science magazine in 2013 found that readers who were assigned to read literary fiction, in comparison with participants who were assigned to read other types of material or none at all, scored higher on subsequent tests measuring levels of empathy.

Both of these tests measure empathy based on familiarity with the classics of literature. Maunu believes studying the classics is a valuable practice because of the empathy it instills. However, she believes the study of the classics should be balanced with reading more contemporary literature.

"For too long, writers of color, LGBTQIA, and women writers were excluded from the canon, so it's important to ensure that their voices are heard," Maunu said. Studying the works of authors whose works fall into these categories as well as the classics helps readers to expand their circle of empathy to encompass all walks of life.

Historically underrepresented populations in Western culture are not the only new voices being heard by readers of literature. The study of literature from around the world has been introduced into the halls of academia now as well.

Reflecting this trend, Maunu teaches World Literature in which she includes texts from Japanese, Nigerian, and Russian literature among other works in the non-Western as well as Western literary canons. Maunu said the lessons of literature help us to see our common humanity.

Maunu believes the study of literature gives us the ability to look at other people's worlds and experiences, an ability that broadens our world and broadens our minds.

Image Sources

Professor Leanne Maunu: Photo courtesy of Leanne Maunu | Used With Permission

JasonPacheEnglishInterview DALL·E 2.png: DALL·E 2 | Public Domain Mark 1.0

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The Experiences We Share: Literature Shows the Human Connection, an Interview with Palomar Professor of English Leanne Maunu

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Part of being human means that we share a common experience of what it means to be a part of humanity. This common body of experience is known as the human condition. Literature comprises written works of the imagination that offer its readers a constellation of glimpses of this human condition.

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How Books Help Us Connect in Ways the Internet Doesn’t

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How Books Help Us Connect in Ways the Internet Doesn’t

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This exploratory source talks about how books help develop our synthesis skills and expose us to different perspectives, which is particularly important in a time when we rely on bite-sized pieces of information that are tailored to our interests.

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A Post-Literate Age

We sometimes characterize the digital age as a "post-literate" age, where images and video have taken over the place that written words used to occupy. But this is a mistaken characterization. The reality is we are reading more than ever in the digital age-on our various screens and devices we encounter upwards of a novel's worth of words every day.

What's changed is the type of reading we're doing online. It's a more disconnected, staccato reading-a tweet here, a context-less headline there, a constant visual hum of assertions, opinions, advertisements, commentary. It's a frenetic type of reading that moves rapidly from unrelated thing to unrelated thing, giving our eyeballs whiplash and exhausting our brains, which are constantly playing triage to determine which words and ideas are trivial and which are important.

This is not the sort of continuous, sustained, concentrated reading conducive to reflective thinking. It's not the sort of reading where deep connections are easily made. That's why books are more important than ever. It's not that we need to be reading more. It's that we need to be reading books more. There are various reasons for this, but a big one is that, in a disconnected digital age, books foster connection-in at least two senses. They connect us with other people, and they connect the dots of ideas. They are massively important sources of both empathy and synthesis-two things vital for increasing wisdom, yet on the decline in today's frenetic age.

Books Connect Us to Others

In theory, the internet and social media-and the vast hyperlinks and networks that comprise the World Wide Web-work to connect us to others. But the reality, which we are seeing in ever greater relief the deeper into the digital age we get, is closer to the opposite. We are actually more isolated, fragmented, and divided than ever. "Social media" has connected us superficially but more profoundly fostered loneliness and polarization. The tailored-to-individuals orientation and algorithmic architecture of the internet means that shared culture and consensus are declining while hyper-segmented bubbles and echo chambers are on the rise.

Computer scientist Jaron Lanier, author of Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now, calls this algorithm-fueled fragmentation an "epochal development" that is making it harder to understand and empathize with each other:

The version of the world you are seeing is invisible to the people who misunderstand you, and vice versa . . . We see less than ever before of what others are seeing, so we have less opportunity to understand each other. ¹

When each of us is seeing a different reality and working off of a different set of "data" and "facts" (that confirm our bias), it's no wonder we talk past each other and cannot make progress on intractable debates. It's no wonder empathy is on the decline.
Reading more books than tweets is one way we can course correct.

When we read books, we are stepping into another's shoes. We are entering the author's world, giving our attention to the author's perspective for an extended time. This last part is key. It's hard to develop empathy when you only read a tweet by someone, but a book-length immersion in someone's world creates the opportunity for understanding.

The act of reading a book is literally the act of being "quick to listen, slow to speak" (James 1:19). In literary fiction, we develop empathy by getting inside characters' minds. We may love or hate them, but to the extent that we listen to and live with them for a time, we can learn from the particularity of their existence.

The act of reading a book is literally the act of being "quick to listen, slow to speak."

Research shows that literary fiction especially helps readers develop empathy-a better understanding of the complexity of what others are thinking and feeling. Reading novels reminds us "that it's possible to connect with some[one] else even though they're very different from you," as Barack Obama said in an interview with Marilynne Robinson. ² It's easy to dismiss one another's perspectives in a hyper-fast social media world. And so with every Graham Greene, Ernest Hemingway, or Toni Morrison character we meet, we recognize there are as many distinct human stories as there are stars in the sky, and each adds a particular gleam, color, and texture to our constellation of wisdom.

Books Help Us Connect the Dots

Books also help make connections. A constellation becomes a constellation, after all, only after you connect the dots to reveal some meaningful shape. One of the best feelings in reading a book, whether a novel or a memoir or an academic tome, is the moment of epiphany where a connection takes shape. This connects with that! Eventually the connecting puzzle pieces reveal a more intelligible image that helps us make sense of this crazy, complex world. As we read more books-and ideally a diverse array of books-our understanding of the world is simultaneously complicated and clarified. On one page we have lightbulb moments, making new sense of some things. Another page unravels what we thought we knew, raising new questions and sending us on new explorations. Such is the nature of learning. The more we read, the hungrier we are for more.

The synthesizing power of reading books can be a powerful antidote to a hyper-fragmented, discombobulated digital environment where our brains are bombarded with scattered stimuli that work against meaningful connections of ideas.

There is a growing body of research that shows the powerful ways reading books-long, immersive reading in contrast to the fragmented, quick-scan reading we do online-strengthens our brains' abilities to think well. In her book, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf explores this research and argues that deep reading is a powerful booster shot for our brains at a time when they are increasingly weakened by digital overload.

Those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read," Wolf writes, while those who don't will have "less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought," making them "ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. ³

At a time when the glut, speed, and tailored-to-you nature of information is making us ever more prone to misinformation and unsound wisdom, reading books offers a powerful antidote.

Books give us solid grounding at a time when everything is up for grabs. They offer rubrics to better evaluate the barrage of information we face in today's world. In a world of snapshots and soundbites, books offer fuller context, and as Andy Crouch writes, "generally speaking, the older the book, the deeper the context." ⁴

Reading books trains our brains to better handle complex information, to reflect and evaluate rather than just accept. To read well is not to take everything the author says at face value. Rather, it is to understand the author's argument as best as we can, learn from it, but check it against what else we know. To read and learn well is to develop the ability to encounter a work in a nuanced way, filing away what's good and dismissing what's not.

In a world bombarding us with untrustworthy information, we need our brains to be better-not worse-at spotting connections, recognizing logical fallacies, and knowing what questions to ask next. Reading more books helps sharpen our brains in these ways.
By helping us better empathize and synthesize, books can be a great asset for a life of wisdom.

Notes:

1. Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now. (New York: Henry Holt and Co, 2018).

2. Wolf, Maryanne. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (New York: Harper, 2018).

3. nybooks.com/articles/2015/11/19/president-obama-marilynne-robinson-conversation-2/

4. andy-crouch.com/extras/on_the_news

Brett McCracken is the author of The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World.

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