READ, AND IN COLOUR TOO

There is one measure to make your children eternally grateful to you – though not just yet - and that is guiding them into the pleasure of reading good books. There are, of course, great films to divert the young of the world, but there are many more great books. Those of you who have experienced life without the internet must concede that, not everything is bad for youngsters in these times of ‘browsing’ and ‘streaming’. Human behaviour does not stand still, but you can’t beat an excellent book. And, with the top authors, you get the story in colour too!

Let’s put it straight - reading is very good for you and depending on the content of the book and what are your interests in life are, it can also be deeply enjoyable. Let’s deal with the clinical bit first. The more reading that you do, the more neural activity – the working of the neurons - occurs in your brain. This gives rise to more neural productivity while also strengthening the various pathways in your brain. The effect on the pathways causes an improvement in overall cognitive ability.  This helps you to recall much more of the information that has entered the brain over the years. Reading strengthens the working memory.

Reading also helps your brain to operate more effectively as you get older. It improves connectivity in the brain, reduces stress, helps you relax and improves sleep. When you’re ticking those boxes you can deny – or at least delay - the arrival of Mr D (dementia), one of the most common versions being Alzheimer’s Disease. Dementia is becoming more visible in society, not least because the average age of human beings continues to increase, without the same degree of attention to longevity of the brain as to the body. What better than to have a ready tool to stave off the entry of dementia for another few years.

Enables

Reading improves the way you write and the way you talk. It enables you to increase your knowledge and it can make you more imaginative and creative. But I can ‘hear’ what some of you are thinking right now: “We can get all that on the internet.” Of course you can. That’s reading on the screen instead of having the traditional hard copy book on your lap.  You can be researching a topic on your laptop or perhaps reading a novel on your electronic book called a Kindle which has enabled you to download a chosen book within 30 seconds of buying it on Amazon.

Fellow bibliophiles – sounds a bit dodgy, but isn’t – will agree that the pleasure of owning a library of great books, both fiction and non-fiction, may never fade, and the adherence to a top-level author is such a rewarding experience. We all have our favourites. I remember reading ‘Pillars of the Earth’ perhaps thirty years ago. It was written by Ken Follett and is a highly acclaimed novel with a powerful style in presenting historical fiction. What can be more fascinating than reading about how people lived in the 12th century and especially in that golden period before the world crashed into the Great War of 1914-18. Mind you, there was nothing great about that.  

Having been hugely impressed by his earlier works, I leaped enthusiastically into the novel ‘Fall of Giants’ by Ken Follett. It is set in 1911 at the time of the coronation of King George V of England. It starts with a young lad called William Williams, living in South Wales where ‘nearly everyone has the surname Williams, Evans, Jones or Morgan.’ Know anyone? So everyone receives early nicknames such as Jones-Goalie and Evans-Crybaby.

Billy-Times-Two (gerrit?) leaves school on his 13th birthday and enters the coal mines where the conditions endured by the miners are nothing short of terrible, working 6.00am to 7pm, 500 metres down into the earth in appallingly unhealthy conditions. And so authentically captured by the writer – I’ve checked it out. How living standards have changed since that time. The young boy spends almost the entire first day deep in the dark coal tunnel entirely alone, encountering the initiation measure - the light going out very quickly. When, at the end of the day Billy faces the jests of the adult miners, they ask: “Weren’t you scared?” The boy says: “No I was with someone.” “Who on earth …?”  Billy, from a strong Christian family, adds – “I was with Jesus.” From that day,he was known as Billy-with-Jesus.

Disagreed

Some will say that writers are a dying species. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can write books. Yes, that’s true, but the takeover will only affect certain material. Some non-fiction may fall under the grasp of AI fairly soon. But every informed source that I’ve checked has disagreed with it extending to fiction. Human language is complex. Throughout our lifetime, our use of words achieves far more than just churning out information. Surely AI will never capture the nuances of language and complexities of human emotion? Technology cannot mimic these intricacies.

But there is one area where AI is looming large, with some risk attached. A very high percentage of high school students in the UK and USA are using AI for homework help, especially brainstorming ideas. The degree and quality of overall supervision must be ramped up rapidly, especially to eliminate the risk of plagiarism where students simply copy AI text and lose the essential originality in text.

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