Enhance your reading efficiency
Over the years, human communication was first made through speech which is a natural process. Yet, reading was invented within a short duration of about only 5000 years ago for a revolutionary change to occur. Scientists proved that reading is a stress buster and moreover interconnected with longevity.
Reading is a complex process that involves the visual cortex, part of the brain, originally processes visuals and conversations. Since this cortex also processes reading activity, it invokes emotions and improves memory.
Your brain challenges you to visualize while reading. It takes you to an imaginary world and provokes your imagination ability. It happens only if you remember what you read.
Right now you might feel like blanked out as you move your eyes from left to right and couldn’t even understand a word. Helpless in recalling then hands down you’re not alone. Adequate brain exercise will help you remember more things.
Ziming Liu, a professor at San Jose University, carries research on the response of reading in a person. In 2012, he observed that when a person reads digitally tends to read with less attention rather than comprehensive reading. Our brain focuses more accurately on the printed or written scripts.
As we live in a digital world, this kind of glance reading has evolved as a contemporary form of reading is the claim by the mind neuroscientist, Marianne wolf in her publication, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018). After a long gap of 10 years, this book returns in order to delineate a cognitive topography cited in her earlier book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2008).
In Reader, Come Home, Wolf put forth the transformation of our brain to a new form of reading and how it makes sense for individuals. This book makes an effort to reflect on articles and academic reading by combining the analysis of neuroscience and education. She has beautifully explained the ins and outs of brain activities, vocabulary, vision and brain’s plasticity. She has successfully accomplished the task of breaking down the complex process into the simplest ones for us to understand. Particularly a must-read book for parents, it comprises a row of letters written by the author to the readers. Ultimately, the author unfolds the heart of the issue: reading is a task and the rate of intake can weaken our critical thought. According to her, faster reading serves no use and clarifies the reason behind so many people find it hard to recall right after skimming.
Both conscious and preoccupied readers frequently forget what they read. Wolf explains the brain activities to understand the reason behind it. Active reading involves a relation between what you read and what you already know. She says you have to constantly ask yourself how far the things you learn are satisfactory to easily remember what you read.
Brain exercise helps in enhancing active learning. It sharpens your brain and upgrades intelligence. As you grow old, the brain’s plasticity makes your brain stronger, sharper and flexible. Cognitive brain training involves speed processing, memory and reasoning training. A healthier brain will lead to a happier and longer life span.
Also, Wolf says that people who do skim-reading don’t allow critical thinking. She proves that speed reading weakens our ability to differentiate information. Furthermore, she mentions that you’ll have a mere remembrance but didn’t have an in-depth understanding.
It’s not a big deal to miss some of the information we receive. It’s very normal for a human being to forget as we put in a lot into our brain.
A cognitive neuroscientist in the name Monica Rosenberg from the University of Chicago says that it’s impossible to process all the data accessible in this world. To filter and distinguish the information that is to be stored in our memory, one must pay attention. You can store the required piece of information and remember or reject the rest of it. For this, you must be able to concentrate on your attention and memory. She had conducted an experiment in 2018 asking a few people to read Greek history and later on found that only those people with concentrated focus could remember what they had read previously. The best way to remember more is when the distraction is less.
In the end, Wolf advises the readers to start their day off with 20 minutes of offline reading materials which assists modest and deeper reading. In her own experience, she has undergone an immense satisfaction of losing herself in a book. Further, she puts in that a reader’s supreme goal must be to think and understand in a better way, not just get by heart.
