That reading is important is perhaps not new to most readers. However, the first results of an ongoing research project suggest that, in addition to improving culture and education, attentive reading also has the advantage of being a way to exercise our brain.
Those responsible for this work are a multidisciplinary team from Stanford University that includes experts in cognition, neurobiology and literature. The main objective of the project is to study the relationship between reading, attention and distraction, to investigate the value of literary study and how this training interacts with our brain.
The research team turned to a group of volunteers, all PhD students in the field of literature, who were asked to read an excerpt from a novel by British writer Jane Austen, while they were hooked up to a functional magnetic resonance machine that measured the flow. of the different areas of the brain. They did two types of reading: a “relaxed” reading and a “critical” reading, of study and literary analysis of the text.
MRI data reveals that our brain behaves differently depending on the type of reading we are doing. Furthermore, to the researchers' surprise, there is also an increase in brain activity in more regions than those responsible for “executive function”.
According to the authors, this is one of the first experiments in which they study how the brain responds to literature and how cognition is shaped not only by what we read, but by the way we read. Even when we are reading a literary text, if we do it with concentration, we will be using several complex cognitive functions of our brain and, in this way, exercising it.
I wish you good readings!
Author: Diana Barbosa
Science in the Regional Press – Ciência Viva
Article reference: http://news.stanford.edu/news/2012/september/austen-reading-fmri-090712.html
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