Why do we read?

Novels, stories, poems – isn’t this an anachronism in the age of information technology? It would seem that books have almost no chance: television and the Internet have long gone on an all-out offensive. But no – 44% of Russians continue to read fiction, 34% of them do so more than once a month*. Still, for many of us there is something in this old-fashioned occupation that is difficult to do without, for which we do not find a replacement. Neuroscience claims that reading prose is beneficial: descriptions, expressive metaphors, and emotionally rich dialogue stimulate different parts of our brain. And also that books play the role of simulations to help practice social interaction skills**. But hardly anyone is guided by such considerations when starting to read. How do we explain to ourselves what makes us open one book after another? After conducting a mini-survey among friends and colleagues, I received different explanations. They are commented by our experts.

* According to a survey conducted by the Public Opinion Foundation in 2014, fom.ru.

** Research overview – on the website of science journalist, columnist for The New-Yorker and Scientific American Annie Murphy Paul anniemurphypaul.com

We experience intense emotions

This is the most obvious explanation: no emotions – no pleasure from the book. For some reason, we need these additional “artificial” experiences. How passionately we love, how tender, strong, confident, sexy (or vicious, treacherous, cynical, worthless, humiliated) we are – along with the heroes of books. Opening the book, we agree in advance to worry, suffer, be afraid, be ashamed, yearn, hate, which we hardly wish ourselves in reality. Why? “Thanks to reading, we achieve that intensity of emotions that we want to get, but we don’t allow ourselves in real life,” explains Anna Skavitina, a Jungian analyst. “We allow ourselves to experience them, but we remain in control of them.” Reading, we can embody any fantasy and know that “nothing will happen” for it. “Here we are in a safe space and we can afford to open up much more than in life,” continues Anna Skavitina, “and the author of the book allows himself (to one degree or another) to open up to us.” So, at this moment we are closer to our present, we feel more alive.

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We understand ourselves

Our life is a stream of emotions. We are so caught up in them that we often lack the distance to comprehend them. When we read, we are both participants and observers: we are emotionally involved in the text, but we keep an outside view, realizing that what is happening in the book is a fictional reality. We have the opportunity to stop, to return to some pages again, to think. “The stronger the emotional impact of the image, the more we want to understand it,” emphasizes the Jungian analyst Lev Khegay. – Both in life and when reading, we project something of our own onto others. When we are talking about a book, it is easier for us to catch these projections: it turns out that I also have such feelings, such thoughts, problems. Reading is always a meeting with another and with yourself at the same time. It is precisely such meetings that are the main condition for the development of our psyche: feelings, memory, thinking, attention … ”Sometimes it seems to us that reading causes us completely new feelings that we did not know in ourselves. “This is not so,” explains Anna Skavitina. “It’s just that when we read, we react more spontaneously and can notice more in ourselves and become more aware of our emotions.” The question is what happens next. “Seeing the new and reviewing the old, we become different,” the analyst continues. “The next step is to experiment with new possibilities already in life.”

We find an interlocutor

Many of us admit that a book for them is an opportunity to communicate with the author. We are attracted by a large-scale personality, intellectual power, talent. Sometimes there is a feeling that the writer “hears” us and “understands” us like no one else. The choice of real interlocutors is always limited by the place and time of our lives, but in the case of books it is boundless. “Here we choose the interlocutor ourselves and automatically send him to our “friends,” says Anna Skavitina. “All you have to do is pick up a book. And how sad it is to part with her, as if a friend had left you. But it is also important that we lose this parting symbolically. We can always return to this friend whenever we want. And it is important for us to feel that we are in control of our lives. That is why teenagers need books, Lev Khegay emphasizes. “Their “I” is very vulnerable, because there is still very little experience of interaction with others, with the world. And reading can become such a protective niche, a temporary incubator in which this “I” will ripen. For example, a teenager has few friends because he does not know how to establish relationships, and he gains this experience in the imaginary space of a book where there is no problem of communication.

We are changing for the better

It is customary to think that by reading, we learn new things. Is it so? “Schopenhauer, for example, said that reading means thinking with someone else’s head instead of your own,” recalls Anna Skavitina. “But if we don’t read, then we don’t use the collective experience of mankind and every time we reinvent the wheel.” It all depends on our reading habits. Schopenhauer’s thought refers rather to those who mechanically consume ideas and values ​​(an example from our days is the endless reposts of quotes from the classics on social networks) or who try to literally copy the behavior of book characters (this is typical of teenagers). Our fast-moving age is pushing for just such a superficial perception. “Many of our contemporaries have lost the skills of thoughtful reading,” says Lev Khegay. “But just absorbing information will not give true spiritual enrichment.” Deep engagement with a book is like meeting a good psychologist. “A safe space appears in which we can freely be angry or express love, identifying ourselves with one of the characters, and this is how the healing effect appears,” notes Lev Khegay. It is not for nothing that psychologists sometimes recommend books to clients in which they can find a hero close to themselves and similar collisions. “Reading gives you the opportunity to see your feelings from the outside – misunderstood, unlived, and call them words,” emphasizes Anna Skavitina. “As a result, unexpected decisions come, new opportunities open up, and life changes for the better.”