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Reading As A Cognitive Exercise
Plus: prolonged grief: a new mental disorder?
The 10almonds Team
March 04, 2024
Today’s almonds have been activated by:
❝It can be a good thing, too, to learn to sit in your own weirdness❞
⏰ IN A RUSH?
Today’s 30-Second Summary
If you don’t have time to read the whole email today, here are some key takeaways:
Reading is great for cognitive health, but a thing that matters as much as quantity is… Quality? No, actually, it’s active engagement.
There are in turn many factors that influence reader engagement, and the good news is, many of them you as a reader get to choose. Today’s main feature explores what they are and how to do them!
Getting kids (and/or grandkids!) to enjoy healthy snacks can be a challenge, but it’s a rewarding one.
Today’s sponsor, Skout Organic, has tasty whole-food snack bars (always 7 ingredients or fewer, all simple) with a wide range of flavors sure to please all the family. Give them a try!
Read on to learn more about these things, or click here to visit our archive
🤫 A WORD TO THE WISE
 | Prolonged Grief: A New Mental Disorder?Dr. Raja Rosenhagen sheds light on what counts as “prolonged grief”, and why it matters: |
👀 WATCH AND LEARN
How Your Jaw and Teeth Influence Your Posture (26:32)
Neal Hallinan (PRT, CSCS, LMT), a restorative massage therapist with many years of experience, talks us through the unlikely (but once explained, clear) link between our teeth and jaw, and our postural health.
This one’s a little longer than we usually include here, but it’s well-worth it if you can make the time:
Want to watch it, but not right now? Bookmark it for later 🔖
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Exercising With Less Soreness!
📖 MAIN FEATURE
Reading, Better
It is relatively uncontroversial to say that reading is good for cognitive health, but we don’t like to make claims without science if we can help it, so let’s get started:
There was a 2021 study, which found that even when controlling for many other factors, including highest level of education, socioeconomic status, and generalized pre-morbid intelligence:
❝high reading activity, as defined by almost daily reading, was associated with lower odds of cognitive decline, compared to low reading activity❞
However, not all reading is the same. And this isn’t just about complexity or size of vocabulary, either. It’s about engagement.
And that level of engagement remains the key factor, no matter how quickly or slowly someone reads, as the brain tends to automatically adjust reading speed per complexity, because the brain’s “processing speed” remains the same:
Read more: Cognitive coupling during reading
Everyone’s “processing speed” is different (and is associated with generalized intelligence and executive functions), though as a general rule of thumb, the more we practice it, the faster our processing speed gets. So if you balked at the notion of “generalized intelligence” being a factor, be reassured that this association goes both ways.
So is the key to just read more?
That’s a great first step! But…
The key factor still remains: engagement.
So what does that mean?
It is not just the text that engages you. You must also engage the text!
This is akin to the difference between learning to drive by watching someone else do it, and learning by getting behind the wheel and having a go.
When it comes to reading, it should not be a purely passive thing. Sure, if you are reading a fiction book at bedtime, get lost in it, by all means. But when it comes to non-fiction reading, engage with it actively!
For example, I (your writer here, hi), when reading non-fiction:
Read at what is generally considered an unusually fast pace, but
Write so many notes in the margins of physical books, and
Write so many notes using the “Notes” function on my Kindle
And this isn’t just like a studious student taking notes. Half the time I am…
objecting to content (disagreeing with the author), or
at least questioning it, or which is especially important, or
noting down questions that came to my mind as a result of what I am reading.
This latter is a bit like:
when you are reading 10almonds, sometimes you will follow our links and go off down a research rabbit-hole of your own, and that’s great!
sometimes you will disagree with something and write to tell us, and that’s great too (when this happens, one or the other or all of us will learn something, and yes, we have published corrections before now)!
sometimes what you read here will prompt a further question, and you’ll send that to us, and guess what, also great! We love questions.
Now, if your enjoyment of 10almonds is entirely passive, don’t let us stop you (we know our readers like quick-and-easy knowledge, and that’s good too), it’s just, the more you actively engage with it, the more you’ll get out of it.
This, by the way, was also a lifelong habit of Leonardo da Vinci, which you can read about here:
👆 a very good book that we reviewed last year
How you read (i.e. what medium) matters too!
Are you reading this on a desktop/laptop, or a mobile device? That difference could matter more than the difference between paper and digital, according to this study from 2020 that found…
❝The cumulation of evidence from this and previous studies suggests that reading on a tablet affords different interactions between the reader and the text than reading on a computer screen.
Reading on a tablet might be more similar to reading on paper, and this may impact the attentional processes during reading❞
What if my mind wanders easily?
You can either go with it, or train to improve focus.
Going with it: just make sure you have more engaging reading to get distracted by. It’s all good.
Training focus: this is trickier, but worthwhile, as executive function (you will remember from earlier) was an important factor too, and training focus is training executive function.
As for one way to do that…
If you’d like a primer for getting going with that, then you may enjoy our previous main feature:
Enjoy!
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❤️ OUR SPONSORS MAKE THIS PUBLICATION POSSIBLE
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📖 ONE-MINUTE BOOK REVIEW
The Mindful Body: Thinking Our Way to Chronic Health – by Dr. Ellen Langer
Fear not, this is not a “think healing thoughts” New Age sort of book. In fact, it’s quite the contrary.
The most common negative reviews for this on Amazon are that it is too densely packed with scientific studies, and some readers found it hard to get through since they didn’t find it “light reading”.
Counterpoint: this reviewer found it very readable. A lot of it is as accessible as 10almonds content, and a lot is perhaps halfway between 10almonds content in readability, and the studies we cite. So if you’re at least somewhat comfortable reading academic literature, you should be fine.
The author, a professor of psychology (tenured at Harvard since 1981), examines a lot of psychosomatic effect. Psychosomatic effect is often dismissed as “it’s all in your head”, but it means: what’s in your head has an effect on your body, because your brain talks to the rest of the body and directs bodily responses and actions/reactions.
An obvious presentation of this in medicine is the placebo/nocebo effect, but Dr. Langer’s studies (indeed, many of the studies she cites are her own, from over the course of her 40-year career) take it further and deeper, including her famous “Counterclockwise” study in which many physiological markers of aging were changed (made younger) by changing the environment that people spent time in, to resemble their youth, and giving them instructions to act accordingly while there.
In the category of subjective criticism: the book is not exceptionally well-organized, but if you read for example a chapter a day, you’ll get all the ideas just fine.
Bottom line: if you want a straightforward hand-holding “how-to” guide, this isn’t it. But it is very much information-packed with a lot of ideas and high-quality science that’s easily applicable to any of us.
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Wishing you a peaceful Sunday with plenty of time to read,
The 10almonds Team
