Fiction, Wandering Thoughts, Hebrew, Biblical Meditation, H.G. Wells, Sleep and Brain-Cell Toxins
The Benefits of Reading Fiction - A microhabit I’ve been engaging in is doing what I called “Educational Reading” for a short time every day. This is a way of reading books I would otherwise not read, and it consists of 5-10 periods once or two a day. One of the books I’ve been reading is called Stolen Focus, by Johann Hari. I’ve mentioned it a couple of times on here already. It seems to me that I’m learning something new and encouraging in essentially every chapter.
Something I read yesterday: there have been scientific studies to test the hypothesis that reading novels boosts an individual’s ability to empathise with other people which suggest that there is indeed a correlation between the two things.
When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. So maybe…if you read a lot of novels you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps fiction is a kind of empathy gym. Boosting your ability to empathise with other people - which is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have.
Johann Hari, Stolen Focus, p.82
I can’t see how this can’t be true on some level. Apart from anything else, reading a novel makes you emphasise with the central characters, particularly when they are written in the first person. Even if the character is objectively despicable, entering the first-person experience of a character in a novel makes you understand them and therefore empathise with them. A good example might be Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment. He’s essentially an arrogant and lazy intellectual who considers himself to be so great that he grants himself permission to murder an old lady and steal her belongings. Objectively, he’s a hateful, evil man. But, because you enter into his world, you root for him. (Or is it only me in that case?)
Anyway, that’s a good reason to read fiction.
Wandering Thoughts - From the same book. I said last week that I was cutting down on podcasts. I have been doing that and have gone from lots of podcasts to almost none. I’ve listened to a couple of things, but it is coming to feel like a form of noise pollution now. The good news is that is seems that having time letting your mind wander without stimulating it to focus on one particular thing is actually immensely beneficial. Scientists who are studying this phenomena think that maybe three things happen when, say, you just go for a walk and let your mind wander: firstly, your brain is working things out automatically about the world, your experiences, things you’ve been thinking about. Studies show that the more you allow this happen, the greater will be your levels of creativity, organisation, and quality decision-making.
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