Reading for enjoyment is one of life's pleasures. Libraries and bookshops exist for this very reason, and writers, agents and publishers have built careers on the consumer demand for new content. Learning to read is a priority, not only because this is required for active participation in society, but also because it unlocks the gateway to a dimension of human life that can be found in literature, knowledge and ideas. Accessing this world of printed language stimulates the imagination, challenges the mind and offers an unlimited range of literary experiences. Above all, a good book is an immersive experience. The external world with all its mundane complexities fades out of awareness as a reader journeys with the author through a compelling book: illuminated by description it induces intense feelings of empathy, intrigue and curiosity. And yet, all of this is an illusion!

Why is it that in our era, which has seen immense acceleration of the fields of science, technology and engineering we still feel and value this need to 'lose ourselves' in books? Perhaps the answer to this question lies deep in our humanity, in our willingness to explore not only what is outside of ourselves, but also what lies within. Beneath our innate curiosity and opportunities to share and chatter about what we read, we also find a profound need for safety and peace. The outside world with all its senseless noise and jolting abrasion simply fades away when we are immersed in a book, and as we enter that 'flow' state, our sense of the passing of time dilates and hours may vanish while we read.

In 'extant' societies that live as hunter-gatherers, safety in numbers is a principle that plays out in reality. Loud communal singing and drumming create the illusion of a large coherent entity, large enough in fact to deter big cats that predate on the darkest of nights. Arguably, communal singing through the night may be a key human survival strategy. There’s evidence to show that feelings of cooperation and safety are experienced when humans sing and dance together and many people report being able to sustain hours of music making, when in a group. Storytelling seems to have the same effect of drawing people together and it's logical to presume that the roots of singing and storytelling are closely entwined.

Birds and fish also deter predators by congregating in synchronised movement patterns. Murmurations of starlings form before they roost for the night and shoals of herrings achieve the same mesmeric effect when they are pursued by predators such as sea bass. Their movement patterns to form flowing and fast moving gestures, as if an enormous creature was approaching, ultimately deceiving and confusing the predator through an illusion.The human experience of achieving a flow state through detecting rhythmic movements and moving in time with those movements shows that these are indeed ways to drop into a trance-like state, allowing a sustained effort over many hours. Anticipating what will happen next is a key aspect of this narrow and sustained focus.

Reading for pleasure can be framed as a social situation in which the reader synchronises with the writer’s style. To ‘get into a book’ we need to achieve a flow state - which is a trance-like state resulting in relatively narrow focus. This means everything else, but the book (or screen) disappears from our attention. The entranced state induces reading fluency and comprehension, drawing us deeper into the text where we might feel that we have ‘escaped’. To 'escape' into a book means to suspend our usual sense of who we are, having become engrossed with the text, perhaps by empathising with the characters, or simply by synchronising with the flow of the writing. A close level of synchrony between the words on the page, and our anticipation of what comes next is arguably similar to the defensive mechanism of creating a larger entity in real time because it involves losing the usual sense of self and becoming part of something larger than day-to-day life.

Enjoy this mini post? Why not read a little more...