How To Choose Books If You Want To Become Smart - Theory of Mind

by Masa

Photo by Christin Hume / Unsplash

You have heard of every successful people's advice. You should read books. That's one advice that's consistent across wide range of people: your mom has told you, your teacher has told you, your business influencer has told you... It seems a rock solid thing you should be doing in life.

When it comes to the real life, it's so hard to do. You want to catch up with one more episode of Game of Thrones before bed. There's one more Friday catch up party with old college friends. There are all these emails to be sent out before Monday. When do we have time for the actual reading?

You will waste your life simply catching up with the popular books you should be reading. With the finite resource we have, it is crucial we become very selective of which books to choose from.  Research suggests that different types of books enhances our brains. Particularly in relation to our interpersonal skill, some books are more effective at improving than the others. In other words, we need to choose only books that have the biggest impact to our gain.

Today we will explore how to choose different types of books to have your brain smarter.

Bad News For You

I have to get over this bad news off my chest first. Some readers are way ahead of you in knowledge curve because skills from reading works in a positive feedback loop.

In 2018, University of Jyväskylä from Finland did a research on the effect of leisure reading and reading comprehension. The researchers followed 2,525 students over 9 years. They found that those who read books in leisure did much better in the reading test than the counterparts. Scores were higher not only on how fast they could read but also on how well they understood the context. Reading digital text like blogging didn't count (newspaper and comicbook a little, but the books were most effective).

What is scary about this finding is those who read books become able to read faster. And they read more books. And they read faster. And so on.

Those leisure kids will do better at school obviously. But the reading skill doesn't disappear. They will continue to excel at the future knowledge work.

This indicates the ever widening skill gap over time. If we don't start acting now and start reading, those guys will be so far ahead in 5 year time that we will never be able to catch up. It's the magical and formidable effect of compound interest of reading skills.

I'm swallowing the bitter pill myself. Consumed by part-time, party and TV during my teenage years, I only started reading books for leisure after university. This has been a bitter lesson only when I've come to see the ocean between me and those who've been reading for their lives. My academic life must have been also much easier if I've started read more earlier.

But it's better late than never right. Let's get started shan't we?

Why Should We Care About Book Selection?

When we pick books, we choose them by popular bookshelves from the bookstore or Amazon. Or it might come from your friend's suggestion. Either way, we're selecting books non selectively without determining how they benefit our brain.

The truth is not all books are good. I mean good for you. No amount of fast reading can help you if all you read is garbage.

Recent research suggests different types of books affect your brain differently. We are not talking about reading for the specific content, but rather in a bigger way it affects our brains at neurological level.

What's The Research About?

Back in 2013, University of Trento published an innovative finding of how book reading changes our perceptions towards others.

The experiment was simple yet brilliant. First, 86 participants were asked to read short passage of texts from either fiction or nonfiction. Next, they were asked to identify given random facial expressions such as contempt, disgust and anger. The researchers then ranked the relations between the types of books they've read and the test scores.

The results came out that those who read fiction text right before the facial expression test scored higher than the non-fiction folks.

Books and Our Emotional Empathy

Why did this score boost happen? They just read simple sentences and our psychology test suddenly got better.

The researchers suggested the followings; our ordinary lives are mediated by conventions and stereotype. In books, we need to infer the feelings and thoughts of characters from different settings. What that means is our boring everyday office smalltalk is not enough to get us deeper into human minds and understand people's real thoughts. Books help us get deep into human psych.

Reading about emotional events, our amygdala which is responsible for the emotional part of our brains gets activated. So when Harry Potter wins a battle against the evil Voldemort, we feel as prideful and triumphant because we are so involved with the character settings. Good job Harry!

This in turn increases our social cognitive ability. That is sometimes called emotional empathy or theory of mind. The higher your empathy skill is, the more you will be able to see from another person's perspective and understand his/her emotion better.

The Goodie Of Having Emotional Empathy

Emotional Intelligence is famously coined by Daniel Goleman in his 1995 book, and it's become one of our enlisted must-have skillset ever since. Some studies even suggested every point increase in emotional intelligence adds $1,300 to your annual salary.

This makes sense right? Imagine that you want to sell a car. If you fail to see the emotional excitement of the customer, you will miss the opportunity to stop all the distractions and focus on that one car to explain the positives features and to help him towards the buying decision. Worse, you will be a pushover salesman who forces a car on people who have 0 interest, eventually driving them away.

The effect of high empathy does not stop at your career development. In 2016, University of Geneva followed 400 adults in age between 10-87 for 12 years asking for their life satisfactions. The results showed that those with high empathy had a higher life satisfaction. That positive offset is likely coming from the more meaningful relationships they flourish over the long span of time.

Whether you have a girlfriend you want to make the relationship last, or an ongoing conflict with your aging parents, tuning your empathy skills becomes your friend.

The same researchers did not stop with the simple comparisons between fiction and non-fiction. They wanted to know if there was a difference among fiction genres. They chose popular fiction and literary fiction.

Let me quickly sort out the example books of the two.

Popular fiction books are the ones that get listed in Amazon best seller section. Genres include thriller, romance, scifi, and fantasy. They tend to rely on interesting plot lines. Examples are Lord of The Rings and Harry Potter series.

Literary fiction is those that get assigned in your English class: Brave New World, 1984, The Great Gatsby, etc. They are the ones that win book awards on TV like National Book Award with the nuance of high culture reading. While popular fiction are simple, consistent and predictable (no offence, we all knew Harry Potter will win from the series one), literary fiction gives a weird unsettling sensation at the end of the story. It leaves a silent yet big scar in your heart. That's literary fiction.

As you might have guessed, literary fiction plays an even bigger effect on identifying human emotion. The researchers suggested literary fiction in the experimnet defamilializes reader's expectations and challenged their conventional thinkings related to societal norms.

This is also where you can set yourself apart. A study shows that as high as 92.4% of people choose popular fiction for their leisure reading. While everyone is busy reading popular fiction, you can choose to read only literary fiction. By consciously selecting literary fiction, you'd fall onto the other 7.6% smart minority.

The King of Empathy Booster - Poem

There's another even better type of reading you can do. This one enhances your empathy level even more than literary fiction. This ultimate enhancer is poetry.

Poetry is inherently short and plot details are missing. You need to infer the meaning behind those small set of words. This process sparks our imaginative brain that helps us see another person's perspective.

Let us go through one example from Emily Dickson:

For each ecstatic instant
We must an anguish pay
In keen and quivering ratio
To the ecstasy.
For each beloved hour
Sharp pittances of years —
Bitter contested farthings —
And Coffers heaped with Tears!

There's no room for speed reading to be useful. You can finish reading those sentences. But those words are utterly useless if you don't infer the poet's intentions. Poem becomes only meaningful after we internalize those situations. A few questions we can ask ourselves are:

  • What is the message of this poem?
  • What was she feeling at the time of writing?
  • When did you last feel ecstatic and anguish at the same time?
  • Do you have such coffers yourself?

I admit there are a lot of room in my life to get used to more poems. For someone like me, there is a free app called Daily English Poems that sends you daily poem from more than 20 poets including Emily Dickinson.

Information Giant

Last but not least, here comes the non-fiction genre. The definition is, well, anything other than non-fiction. These books sell 33% more in US than fiction genre. This trend has been continuous in the past few years.

From the previous study, we've learned that non-fiction is not a good book to boost our emotional empathy. Is there any other benefit. To helps us understand the benefit, I've divided non-fiction books into 3 categories.

  1. Career Oriented
  2. Self-Help
  3. General Knowledge

Career Oriented

These books directly help us get ahead in things we are trying to achieve. Textbooks help you get better marks at school, so you can finish universities or master. In workforce? You will be reading career oriented books to help get ahead in the job market. A marketer may read about word of mouth viral marketing, social media marketing, copywriting, etc.

In this category, it is best to work backward from the questions. They can be your exam questions or particular problems you are trying to solve. Then go backward to find such answers. You are just extracting the specific passage out of the whole texts.

Self-Help

These books are how to guide to tackle specific concerns you have in your daily life. This can be an improvement of your diet, finance, running, relationship, mindset, etc. In fact, I just finished reading a book "Why We Sleep" by Matthew Walker, which tells me getting a minimum 7 hours of sleep is as necessary as reading a book.

The books try to improve over your life in tangible manners. Compared to the career oriented, the information is less direct and includes more general background knowledge in the topic. We won't know why we should eat Tuna without understanding omega 3 fatty acid for example. The books are often made to with more entertaining punchlines.

The writing style is organized and concise. Books accompany bullet points and practical takeaways right there. You are not expected to have any prior expertise in this genre. This type of books is a good start for anyone who's new to book reading.

General Knowledge

This is all the rest: history, science, technology, biography. It helps us make sense of who we are, what surrounds us, and what the pressing social issue is. We will be able to understand the ongoing news much better. For example,  there are many books that discuss about the future of AI for non technical persons. Reading that may be useful because knowing AI will take away your job you can change the career decision.

Just be cautious consuming this category of books all the time. That might make you knowledgeable about all the random facts. But at the end of the day, you are just a generalist. What you want is to gain tangible results in your real life.

Benefit of Non-Fiction Reading

This part is my own analysis. Reading non-fiction books will increase our skills to skim for the targeted information and understand it accurately. That can be a valuable life skill. To demonstrate, I have one following scenario.

You own a small cafe that is at the downtown core of your city. In the midst of summer season, the coronavirus wave hits. The government is telling you to shut down the business. In exchange, they are boasting you can apply for a business relief program that supports with your rent.

Ok that's great. The problem is that the government won't just deposit the money into your account. You will need to read through the requirement document and fill out the application. Unless you have a fancy lawyer to ask for help at hand, reading is a minimum skill required to benefit from this basic rights.

That scenario manifests in scholarship, tax filing, government grants, fight for legal rights, and many more. Only those who can read sufficiently reap all the benefits, while you cry over your quiet espresso machine. This is the reality of our modern lives.

Books for Life

Non fiction gives you an immediate tangible result you can measure. It is meant to directly improve your life. Fiction reading on the other hand is a long term strategy. It will improve your overall well-beings an happiness with others.

To maximize the benefit, it's best to pick your fiction selection from poems or literary classics. If you are going for non-fiction, think clearly before opening a book of what exactly you are trying to get out of the books. And be careful of being indulged in mindlessly collecting general knowledge.

If you use books wisely to your own benefit despite the limited time available, your life will become far better in 5 years down the road.