Developing Your Mind By Reading

Radio drama has mostly vanished. Anyone who grew up listening to those broadcasts will recall the mental work involved: with no pictures to lean on, you filled the empty spaces yourself, building the scene out of nothing but voices and sound effects. Reading does something close to that, and it has done so for as long as people have read and will keep doing it. It stretches the imagination. It asks you to picture what the words only point at. Certain books push harder than others, laying out a subject in detail yet deliberately leaving gaps, so the reader has to supply the connecting pieces before the whole thing makes sense.

There's also the matter of speed. I move through a page faster than I can sit through an audiobook or a DVD, and being forced to go at their pace makes me restless. I'm not a speed reader, though I gather that would be quicker still. The one experience I'd compare to this is hypnosis, which I've been through. Under it, time stretches or compresses, and what you see in your head can come across sharper and more lifelike than any photo or video. Speed things up and events that would normally take hours can be run past you in minutes, sometimes seconds. Forgotten details tend to surface, too, once you're in that trance state.