Reading Helps Create Our Authenticity

When we read, we not only retain words and reconvert stories, but we also make them our own. Reading helps to have a more critical and genuine thinking.

Reading is an infinite world of possibilities, it expands knowledge and, in turn, opens the doors to other realities, motivating reflection. In addition, it allows us to understand many tendencies of thought that perhaps, at some point, have seemed strange and absurd.

The reading process is one of the most direct and comprehensive paths to knowledge that may exist. This activity, in addition to testing the previous knowledge of each of the readers, calls for investigation, incites curiosity and breaks with some schemes and certainties that have been adopted without question.

However, despite being a process that brings with it so many benefits for people, it is a neglected and sometimes “despised” process by many : they see it as boring and tedious, and many times they carry it out out of obligation and required demands. for their training as a professional (Méndez and Mogollón 2009).

Reading helps create our own opinions

Read and you will drive, don’t read and you will be driven. This sentence of Saint Teresa of Jesus perfectly sums up how reading makes us more independent and free. Reading does not give man wisdom in itself, but it gives him knowledge.

Our opinions are formative by what we observe, hear, but all of this is impregnated with others, with another reasoning and another perspective. Only what we integrate into our history with our own language has our own stamp. It is true that books are told by others narrating other people’s stories, but it is our reasoning that completes the story. You will never read a book and it will return the same to you.

The act of reading regularly brings us great  benefits on a cognitive level. It improves our capacity for abstraction, imagination, concentration and memory. Our brain in some ways works like a muscle and reading exercises it.

Every time we start to read, the left hemisphere of our brain kicks in, working at full speed to activate different areas. According to neurologist Stanislas Dehaene, from the Collège de France,  reading ability modifies the brain.

Reading is a conversation with yourself

Getting into the habit of reading is like building a refuge from the vicissitudes of life. A warm home where loneliness is not a problem thanks to what others show us through their stories. Stories that little by little we are making our own. Thus, reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body.

In a busy life, reading has enough value to claim a space, otherwise we will be surrendering to a “self-chosen ignorance”. These words of Confucius reflect the importance of reading.

A threat to the benefits of reading is the arrogant reader who insists on standing tall in front of what he reads. That he or she is amazed, that he is not amazed, that he has lost, with childhood, the ability to be surprised.

The reader who reduces everything to his image, to his measure, who only turns his eyes to what he can relate to his self, the one who reads appropriating what he reads. In this case, reading loses the values ​​of creativity, knowledge and ingenuity, although it continues to maintain the qualities of exercising memory and concentration.

As Lyndon Baines Johnson, the pedagogue who became president of the United States from 1963 to 1969, said, a book is the most effective weapon against intolerance and ignorance. Let us use these weapons in the form of paper to combat ignorance – especially that which is ignored.