My fascination with bibliotherapy is rooted in a need for self validation, granted. But there are reasons we value reading of the pleasure variety. My heretofore undocumented intent for this blog is to keep me focused on this idea so that there may come a time when I can put all the pieces together and have something worth sharing.
Tonight (3:51 a.m.), eureka, we read for positive self reinforcement. That, and as an added benefit, we have a better chance of embedding something in our memory if it's in the form of a story. (There's a reason all religious leaders have been excellent storytellers...)
Then again, stories have multiple level impacts, one of which involving affecting our moods aka emotions aka neurotransmitters or brain chemistry. So...in effect, we could alter our mood, or state of mind, by what we are reading, i.e., reading alters our consciousness. Trippy, right?
So, if we tag what we read, not just with subject, author, title, keyword language, but take it to the next level and tag with how the reading made us feel, we would have a huge database equivalent to a literary drugstore of psychotropic and/or homeopathic remedies. (That is, if you are like me in that sometimes you find yourself not in the frame of mind you would like to be inhabiting and would like to lift to a preferable head space.
More on this, and please make suggestions on implementation of the above. The collaborative opportunity is a big part of what would make this work.
