The Benefits of Reading Every Day

• Ritika Dawadi

Reading once in a while ( maybe each week) itself comes with numerous benefits, so imagine your surprise when you figure out how advantageous reading every day can be. It does not matter what you are reading — what matters is the fact that you are reading. Other than developing a well cherished and useful habit, reading can also act as a source of entertainment for many (myself included).

Reading improves your vocabulary:

“Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”

If you read regularly, you will get familiar with awesome new worlds and metaphors that your friends might not know about; that’s automatically going to make you sound like the smartest person in the room. Research and science have concluded that students who read often have a plethora of vocabulary and knowledge compared to those to read seldom. 

Reading and your brain and synapses:

Let us add a little bit of biology to this topic, because why not? ( after all, metaphors are the powerhouse of a cell, ahaha). Firstly, synapses are the site of transmission of electric nerve impulses between two nerve cells; it is also the neuro junction that is responsible for memories. When you are repeatedly exposed to the same thing ( maybe a sound of a person or their face or your math formula), your synapses in your hippocampus (where long term memory is stored ) increase. This is also the reason you can vividly picture your mother’s face even when you are on a voice call (the magic of synapses). 

Getting back to the reading, when you get exposed to the same kind of metaphors and words in a text, you will be very likely to store them in your mind, and will inevitably come to use them in real life later. These eclectic nerve impulses increase and strengthen more as you read regularly.  

Brain scans have revealed that brain connection increases throughout the reading time and for many days thereafter, particularly in the somatosensory cortex, the portion of the brain that responds to physical sensations such as movement and pain.

You are less likely to be a bad person:

You might be thinking, "Wait but how? Are they even not mutually exclusive?”. Well, you might have seen that people who do not read often are likely to be very less empathetic, homophobic, racist, sexist, and misogynist compared to regular readers. When you read, you get sucked into the minds of different characters who might be so different from you, and when you walk in their shoes, you get familiar with so many things which you might not have otherwise. Reads tend to understand people better, because of all the lives they have lived. While a single session of reading literary fiction is unlikely to elicit this experience, research reveals that long-term fiction readers have a more developed theory of mind.

Escapism? Escapism. Imagination? Imagination

You read, you get transported into lands of magic and talking animals. You live there, nevertheless temporarily ( oh, to be able to live in your favourite fictional world). When you flip through the pages of a book, you are not you anymore, you might be an assassin fighting for their life, or perhaps someone about to travel the world. Leaving the real world is always a win-win. When escapism comes to imagination, people who read typically have vivid and thorough imagination and creativity compared to those who do not.