Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Showing posts with label reading. Show all posts
Sunday, December 16, 2012
Saturday, August 28, 2010
Like being in love: Reading
In skimming some of the sites earlier today, it dawned on me. (I love that saying "dawned on me.") Reading is like being in love. As in love, for a short time, we are taken out of ourselves and feel connected with something larger. Whether it's a character, the author, the setting, it's the connection to something that expands while encompassing (a magical word) our being.
Have you fallen in love lately?
Have you fallen in love lately?
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Why Read?
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.
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.
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