"There's a feeling I love almost more than anything: the feeling of sinking into a good book while the world around me fades away. My breathing slows, my shoulders drop, and the mental chatter in the back of my mind goes quiet. What's happening in those moments goes far deeper than entertainment or education, and we seem to sense this instinctively."
"Reading is relaxing, and many people do it as a counterbalance to our overstimulated age. But what exactly is happening when we read? What's going on beneath the surface that makes reading a book feel so restorative? The answer lies in how reading changes our neurochemistry in real time. Reading isn't just about decoding words on a page. It's a complex neurochemical process that affects everything from our heart rate to our hormone levels."
Reading produces deep physiological relaxation that slows breathing, lowers tension, and quiets mental chatter. Reading changes neurochemistry in real time and influences heart rate and hormone levels. Reading recruits ancient pattern-recognition circuitry evolved to interpret environmental cues, with written language co-opting those networks because dedicated reading circuits are evolutionarily recent. Neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene names this the "neuronal recycling hypothesis." Visual systems recognize letter shapes and transform them into words while language networks map words to stored meanings. Attention systems maintain narrative focus and memory systems integrate new information as multiple brain regions coordinate activity.
Read at Big Think
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