Literature and Rigid Thinking

Want someone to get past their rigid thinking and increase their openness? Put a novel in their hands. Canadian researchers say it will help them become more sophisticated thinkers and increase their creativity.  

University of Toronto students were asked to read either one of eight short stories or one of eight essays. Afterward, they each filled out a survey to measure the desire for certainty and stability. The short story readers had much lower scores on that test than those who read the essays. The fiction readers showed they needed less order and had more comfort with ambiguity. This was particularly true for participants who already read regularly.  

Writing in the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers say, “Exposure to literature may offer a (way for people) to become more likely to open their minds.” 

Fiction readers can more easily follow thinking styles that differ from their own—they can feel along with characters they may not even like—gaining a better understanding of the viewpoint. 

Read more about the study here. 

Stephen Goforth

Choosing Reading over Doomscrolling

I always have a book next to wherever I put my phone. So if I have the urge to check my phone for another useless doomscrolling session, I physically can see the book there. Nine times out of 10, I will choose the book, because I know what’s in store for me if I get on my phone. -Librarian Allison Escoto quoted in Vox

A Good Life

There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet. Who would call a day spent reading a good day? But a life spent reading — that is a good life.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

(Born April 30, 1945)

Is it relatable?

"Relatable" is in the eye of the beholder, but its very nature is to represent itself as universal. It's shorthand that masquerades as description. 

The problem arises when "relatability" becomes the sole interpretive lens.

Can you "relate" to being enslaved, for example?  Probably not, but that should make the prospect of reading Frederick Douglass all the more enticing. Many popular texts printed in the United States before the 20th century dwell on religious thought in a way that seems strange to us now. How can nonreligious people living in the 21st century "relate" to that mindset? The realization "I don't relate to that" could be followed by a subsequent self-examination: "What is it about my life, and my time, that has made it so that I don't really get it?"

Rebecca Onion writing in Slate

Bridging the Generation Gap with Reading

And then one day, she asked him what he was reading. He had just started “The Hunger Games,” a series of dystopian young-adult novels by Suzanne Collins. The grandmother decided to read the first volume so that she could talk about it with her grandson the next time they chatted on the phone. She didn’t know what to expect, but she found herself hooked from the first pages, in which Katniss Everdeen volunteers to take her younger sister’s place in the annual battle-to-the-death among a select group of teens.

The book helped this grandmother cut through the superficialities of phone chat and engage her grandson on the most important questions that humans face about survival and destruction and loyalty and betrayal and good and evil, and about politics as well. Now her grandson couldn’t wait to talk to her when she called—to tell her where he was, to find out where she was and to speculate about what would happen next.

Will Schwalbe, Books for Living

the active brain

Being a bookworm, jotting down your thoughts and completing other tasks that keep your brain active may help you stay sharp in your later years.

A study published on July 3, 2013 in the journal Neurology revealed that reading, writing, and doing other mentally-stimulating activities at every age helped stave off memory problems.

"Our study suggests that exercising your brain by taking part in activities such as these across a person's lifetime, from childhood through old age, is important for brain health in old age," study author Robert S. Wilson said in a press release. Wilson is senior neuropsychologist of the Rush Alzheimer's Disease Center at the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago.

Study participants who reported the most reading and writing later in life were able to slow their memory decline by 32 percent compared to people with average mental activity. Those who reported the lowest mental stimulation in their later years had a 48 percent faster memory decline compared to the average.

Read more from the BBC here