Is reading actually a productive use of time, or is it secretly just as productive as 4chan except socially seen as more intellectual? Does frequent reading actually better oneself?
>>8272342
Depends on what you read
That depends if you apply the knowledge you glean from reading. Most people don't or don't have the opportunity, so for them one could say 4chan and literature are functionally, though not experientially, identical.
>>8272342
If you read intellectual literature, yes, if not, less so, but it is still beneficial.
I think it's one of those things where it's more likely to be spontaneously productive if you read because you dig it. I'm probably wrong though.
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/novel-finding-reading-literary-fiction-improves-empathy/
>>8272342
It's immensely productive. The effects of literature on the brain vary from person to person, but there are so many variables involved. It depends on what resonates with you, what you are actually reading, how much effort you put in the understanding of what you reading, how much you let the ideas of the book steep inside your brain, etc.
Reading is not always just coldly feeding yourself with strands of information that may or may not be useful. Literature as looked from an abstract perspective is a vast invisible language, a communication between brains that may not even be alive in the same time. Contact with one another from our own distant bodily islands of cerebral consciousness.
We all know as readers that in everything you read the fruit is not always given to you from the face value. There is a deep construct of meaning hidden within combinations of words and ideas. The complete library of written works in the entire earth is a puzzle piece we all attempt to solve in our lifetimes.
That's all I gotta say.
