It cannot be a mere coincidence that all successful, fulfilled, intelligent people are readers. There must be something about books that make them so special that everyone we look up to obsesses over them. And indeed, there is much to obsess over about books, but entertainment is not their primary relevance to our lives. Books are storehouses of wisdom – a tangible symbol of the progress of humanity. Here we have pointed out 7 importance of books in our life.
7 Importance of Books In Our Life:
Increase empathy
Books prompt us to live inside the head of fictional characters. As we look at events and plots from the perspective of these characters, we forsake our own conscience and inhabit theirs instead. This teaches us to be sensitive to their joys and sorrows, and to place ourselves in their shoes in an attempt to live their experience. Books teach us to feel what we wouldn’t feel otherwise, but what others feel due to their situations, and therein lies the triumph of humanity.
Enhance emotional and intelligence quotient
It is no novel understanding that books play important roles in our EQ and IQ. Apart from boosting empathy, books also make us vulnerable to emotions, prompting us to feel them and accept them as a part of our life. Of course this is the first step to mastering and regulating emotions. Plus, books are primary sources of information about the world, and often contain wisdom handed down from generations.
Increase attention span and memory
Books can have important positive impacts on the cognitive functioning of humans. They force you to abandon all other trains of thought and focus your energies on the material you are reading. This practice in concentration is almost a form of meditation which improves attention spans in the long run. And of course, you need to remember plot points in order to follow and grasp the storyline in its entirety. This is an effective exercise in memorizing based on comprehension.
Bolster vocabulary, grammar, semantics and pragmatics
Of course, books have important practical benefits as well. As you read extensively from varying genres, your lexicon of words increases. Thus, as you look at more and more words and apply meaning to them contextually, your mental storehouse of words to use in daily conversations increases. In addition, the rules of using words, the appropriate contextual meaning of words and social conventions for usage of words increases. All in all, the capacity to work with knowledge improves significantly with the increase in reading.
Act as an escape mechanism
Books can have psychological advantages as well. Often, when reality becomes too dreadful to live through it, books act as an escape. They provide us with rich and colourful worlds vastly different from our own, thus allowing to experience vicariously what we cannot first hand. Books thus allow us to take a break from the harsh reality of the world, and get lost in constructed worlds of the author’s imagination.
Give an impetus to imagination and creativity
Books, as previously mentioned, allow us to inhabit worlds not of our experiences. They allow us to give a free reign to our trains of thought, allowing them to wander places we haven’t previously explored. We thus encounter ourselves within bookish worlds oftentimes, because we are exploring parts of our imagination we never knew existed. Books thus boost creativity, because they let us know that it is okay to dream, and it is alright to live in our heads.
Make the heart happy
The final reason books are so important is that they are sources of pure and ultimate happiness. This is happiness that cannot be taken away – this is the happiness of learning, of love and of life itself. Books are doorways into worlds beyond our imagination, and if that doesn’t make your heart happy, what will?
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