How to Break Up with Your Phone, Revised Edition: The 30-Day Digital Detox Plan

by Catherine Price

Not only can getting lost in a book be a very relaxing and restorative experience, but it’s also exactly the type of mental exercise that strengthens our attention spans and encourages deep and creative thought. Why? Because extracting meaning from symbols requires your brain both to maintain focus on those symbols and to simultaneously ignore everything else going on around you. Over time, regular reading causes physical changes to the brain in areas responsible for reasoning, processing visual signals, and even memory. In other words, learning to read doesn’t just enable us to store and retrieve information; it literally changes the way we think. It reorganizes our neural circuitry in a way that encourages creativity, problem solving, and insight. And it increases our ability to sustain attention. In fact, many scholars believe that the development of written language was an integral step toward the development of culture. As Maryanne Wolf writes in her fascinating book about reading, Proust and the Squid, “New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read.”