WRITTEN BY Susan Reynolds    Contributor, Psychology Today

Source: What you read matters more than you might think

A study published in the International Journal of Business Administration in May 2016, found that what students read in college directly affects the level of writing they achieve. In fact, researchers found that reading content and frequency may exert more significant impacts on students’ writing ability than writing instruction and writing frequency. Students who read academic journals, literary fiction, or general nonfiction wrote with greater syntactic sophistication (more complex sentences) than those who read fiction (mysteries, fantasy, or science fiction) or exclusively web-based aggregators like Reddit, Tumblr, and BuzzFeed. The highest scores went to those who read academic journals; the lowest scores went to those who relied solely on web-based content.

The difference between deep and light reading

Recent research also revealed that “deep reading”—defined as reading that is slow, immersive, rich in sensory detail and emotional and moral complexity—is distinctive from light reading—little more than the decoding of words. Deep reading occurs when the language is rich in detail, allusion, and metaphor, and taps into the same brain regions that would activate if the reader were experiencing the event. Deep reading is great exercise for the brain, and has been shown to increase empathy, as the reader dives deeper and adds reflection, analysis, and personal subtext to what is being read. It also offers writers a way to appreciate all the qualities that make novels fascinating and meaningful—and to tap into his ability to write on a deeper level.

Deep reading synchronizes your brain

Deep reading activates our brain’s centers for speech, vision, and hearing, all of which work together to help us speak, read, and write. Reading and writing engages Broca’s area, which enables us to perceive rhythm and syntax; Wernicke’s area, which impacts our perception of words and meaning; and the angular gyrus, which is central to perception and use of language. These areas are wired together by a band of fibers, and this interconnectivity likely helps writers mimic and synchronize language and rhythms they encounter while reading. Your reading brain senses a cadence that accompanies more complex writing, which your brain then seeks to emulate when writing.

Here are two ways you can use deep reading to fire up your writing brain:

Read poems

In an article published in the Journal of Consciousness Studies, researchers reported finding activity in a “reading network” of brain areas that were activated in response to any written material. In addition, more emotionally charged writing aroused several regions in the brain (primarily on the right side) that respond to music. In a specific comparison between reading poetry and prose, researchers found evidence that poetry activates the posterior cingulate cortex and medial temporal lobes, parts of the brain linked to introspection. When volunteers read their favorite poems, areas of the brain associated with memory were stimulated more strongly than “reading areas,” indicating that reading poems you love is the kind of recollection that evokes strong emotions—and strong emotions are always good for creative writing.

Read literary fiction

Understanding others’ mental states is a crucial skill that enables the complex social relationships that characterize human societies—and that makes a writer excellent at creating multilayered characters and situations. Not much research has been conducted on the theory of mind (our ability to realize that our minds are different than other people’s minds and that their emotions are different from ours) that fosters this skill, but recent experiments revealed that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of affective theory of mind (understanding others’ emotions) and cognitive theory of mind (understanding others’ thinking and state of being) compared with reading nonfiction, popular fiction, or nothing at all. Specifically, these results showed that reading literary fiction temporarily enhances theory of mind, and, more broadly, that theory of mind may be influenced greater by engagement with true works of art. In other words, literary fiction provokes thought, contemplation, expansion, and integration. Reading literary fiction stimulates cognition beyond the brain functions related to reading, say, magazine articles, interviews, or most online nonfiction reporting.

Instead of watching TV, focus on deep reading

Time spent watching television is almost always pointless (your brain powers down almost immediately) no matter how hard you try to justify it, and reading fluff magazines or lightweight fiction may be entertaining, but it doesn’t fire up your writing brain. If you’re serious about becoming a better writer, spend lots of time deep-reading literary fiction and poetry and articles on science or art that feature complex language and that require your lovely brain to think.

This post originally appeared at PsychologyToday.com. Susan Reynolds is the author of Fire Up Your Writing Brain, a Writer’s Digest book. You can follow her on Twitter or Facebook.

Why we react to inconvenient truths as if they were personal insults.

Albert Einstein was one of the most important physicists of all time. His scientific predictions have withstood 100 years of scientific challenges. His thinking fundamentally changed the way we understand the universe. Yet people are more likely to be convinced Einstein wasn’t a great physicist than to change their minds on topics like immigration or the death penalty.

It has nothing to do with a person’s intelligence (or the quality of information on Einstein or immigration policy). It’s due to the fact that we’re simply more open to changing our minds on nonpolitical topics. Scientists have been keen to figure out why — because if they can, it may open the door to the hardest challenge in politics right now: changing minds.

Psychologists have been circling around a possible reason political beliefs are so stubborn: Partisan identities get tied up in our personal identities. Which would mean that an attack on our strongly held beliefs is an attack on self. And the brain is built to protect the self.

When we’re attacked, we evade or defend — as if we have an immune system for uncomfortable thoughts, one you can see working in real time.

“The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body, to protect the body,” Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the University of Southern California, tells me. “The psychological self is the brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our [brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has for protecting the body.”

Recently, Kaplan has found more evidence that we tend to take political attacks personally. In a study recently published in Scientific Reports, he and collaborators took 40 self-avowed liberals who reported having “deep convictions,” put them inside in a functional MRI scanner, and started challenging their beliefs. Then they watched which parts of the participants’ brains lit up. Their conclusion: When the participants were challenged on their strongly held beliefs, there was more activation in the parts of the brain that are thought to correspond with self-identity and negative emotions.

The study is limited. But it is intriguing new evidence that we mistake ideological challenges as personal insults. This suggests that to change minds, we need to separate opinions from identities — a task that proves particularly hard with politics.

The experiment

The question of the study was this: What happens in the brain in the moment when we’re confronted with an argument that runs counter to our partisan identities? To answer it, Kaplan and colleagues — including neuroscientist and author Sam Harris — set up an experiment.

“We didn’t set out to understand partisan stubbornness per se,” Kaplan said. “We wanted to understand what happens in the brain when we resist changing our minds.”

The participants were shown a string of statements they were sure to agree with, like, “The US should reduce its military budget.”

The researchers then countered with statements making such assertions as, “Russia has nearly twice as many active nuclear weapons as the United States.” (Note: The counterarguments, like this one, weren’t all factual. They were exaggerated or manufactured to be extra compelling, Kaplan said. For the sake of the experiment, he says, it doesn’t matter if the participants knew some were lies. Being skeptical “is definitely part of the process we were studying.”)

The participants also saw a series of nonpolitical statements like, “Thomas Edison invented the lightbulb,” and, “Albert Einstein is generally acknowledged to be one of the greatest physicists of all time”; those were also challenged with follow-up statements (which were also exaggerated or manufactured at times). The point of these experiments was to compare reactions: Was there a difference in the way the participants’ brains processed the challenges to their political beliefs versus something presumably less emotional like Edison’s legacy?

There was. Notably, Kaplan and colleagues saw increased activation with the political arguments in what’s called the “default mode network.” That’s a collection of brain structures implicated “in mind wandering, in memory, in thinking about yourself and your identity,” Kaplan says. The study also found increased activation in the amygdala, a region of the brain that correlates with negative emotions.

Basically, the results suggest the participants are engaging the same regions of the brain where we contemplate our identities and feel threats. And it’s presumably within these circuits that the roadblocks to accepting facts lie.

These results were mirrored in a questionnaire. Kaplan found participants were more likely to be influenced by the politically charged arguments than the nonpolitical ones. The topics and the degree to which participants changed their minds are shown in the chart below. It’s no sweat to change your mind on the accomplishments of Thomas Edison. But on topics like abortion, same-sex marriage, and immigration, people don’t budge.

Scientific Reports

So what does this mean?

Kaplan admits that neuroscientists don’t know, precisely, what the “default mode network” does. It likely serves many overlapping functions. Which brings us to a problem with a lot of neuroscience studies: It’s easy to see what areas of the brain “light up” during a task. It’s much, much harder to definitely conclude what those areas of the brain are doing.

But this study is a piece of evidence that this network is involved when it comes to thinking about closely held beliefs. Previously, Kaplan has found the default mode network is active when people read stories that reflect their personal values.

The results of the latest paper will need to be replicated in a larger sample, and among self-avowed conservatives, to hold more weight. With 40 participants, this study is small. It’s especially small when it comes to questionnaire data in the chart above: It would be better to pose these questions to a sample of a few hundred people. (Studies using fMRI are typically smaller than other psychology studies because the machines cost around $500 an hour to run.)

But these results are an intriguing step: The brain processes politically charged information (or information about strongly held beliefs) differently (and perhaps with more emotion) than it processes more mundane facts. It can help explain why attempts to correct misinformation can backfire completely, leaving people more convinced of their convictions.

The results also jibe with some of Kaplan and Harris’s past work on religious beliefs. “When we compared evaluating religious statements to nonreligious statements, we [found] some of the same brain regions that are active in the current study,” Kaplan said. Which makes sense, because religious beliefs also factor into our identities.

What the new study definitely doesn’t show is that “political beliefs are hardwired,” Kaplan says. We can change our minds. Reflecting on his work and his own experience, Kaplan says a good way to make facts matter is to remind people that who they are and what they believe are two separate things.

Easier said than done.

 

A bunch of interesting facts about reading in one handy infographic

Source: INFOGRAPHIC: How the World Reads

Did you know that people in India read an average of 10.4 hours a week? Or that regular readers are 2.5 times less likely to develop Alzheimer’s Syndrome? This handy infographic from FeelGood puts a bunch of different interesting facts together in one infograhpic.

by JON HAMILTON

Bombarding young mice with video and audio stimulation changes the way the brain develops. But some scientists think those sorts of brain changes could protect kids from stressing out in a busy world.

Source: Heavy Screen Time Rewires Young Brains, For Better And Worse

There’s new evidence that excessive screen time early in life can change the circuits in a growing brain.

Scientists disagree, though, about whether those changes are helpful, or just cause problems. Both views emerged during the Society for Neuroscience meeting in San Diego this week.

The debate centered on a study of young mice exposed to six hours daily of a sound and light show reminiscent of a video game. The mice showed “dramatic changes everywhere in the brain,” said Jan-Marino Ramirez, director of the Center for Integrative Brain Research at Seattle Children’s Hospital.

“Many of those changes suggest that you have a brain that is wired up at a much more baseline excited level,” Ramirez reported. “You need much more sensory stimulation to get [the brain’s] attention.”

So is that a problem?

On the plus side, it meant that these mice were able to stay calm in an environment that would have stressed out a typical mouse, Ramirez explained. But it also meant they acted like they had an attention deficit disorder, showed signs of learning problems, and were prone to risky behavior.

A more optimistic interpretation came from Leah Krubitzer, an evolutionary neurobiologist at the University of California, Davis. “The benefits may outweigh the negative sides to this,” Krubitzer said, adding that a less sensitive brain might thrive in a world where overstimulation is a common problem.

The debate came just weeks after the American Academy of Pediatrics relaxed its longstanding rule against any screen time for kids under two. And it reflected an evolution in our understanding of how sensory stimulation affects developing brains.

Researchers learned many decades ago that young brains need a lot of stimulation to develop normally. So, for a long time parents were encouraged to give kids as many sensory experiences as possible.

“The idea was, basically, the more you are exposed to sensory stimulation, the better you are cognitively,” Ramirez said.

Then studies began to suggest that children who spent too much time watching TV or playing video games were more likely to develop ADHD. So scientists began studying rats and mice to see whether intense audio-visual stimulation early in life really can change brain circuits.

Studies like the one Ramirez presented confirm that it can. The next question is what that means for children and screen time.

“The big question is, was our brain set up to be exposed to such a fast pace,” Ramirez said. “If you think about nature, you would run on the savanna and you would maybe once in your lifetime meet a lion.”

In a video game, he said, you can meet the equivalent of a lion every few seconds. And human brains probably haven’t evolved to handle that sort of stimulation, he said.

Krubitzer, and many other scientists, said they aren’t so sure. It’s true this sort of stimulation may desensitize a child’s brain in some ways, they said. But it also may prepare the brain for an increasingly fast-paced world.

“Less than 300 years ago we had an industrial revolution and today we’re using mobile phones and we interact on a regular basis with machines,” Krubitzer said. “So the brain must have changed.”

Krubitzer rejected the idea that the best solution is to somehow turn back the clock.

“There’s a tendency to think of the good old days, when you were a kid, and [say], ‘I didn’t do that and I didn’t have TV and look how great I turned out,’ ” Krubitzer said.

Gina Turrigiano, a brain researcher at Brandeis University, thinks lots of screen time may be fine for some young brains, but a problem for others.

“Parents have to be really aware of the fact that each kid is going to respond very, very differently to the same kinds of environments,” she said.