The soothing power of books

Question 1

scanning

Answer 1

reading rapidly in order to find specific facts.

What type of books do you like to read? I love reading crime fiction - you know detective stories by authors like Ruth Rendell or Agatha Christie. Really? Do you find them relaxing? I wouldn’t say relaxing exactly, but I get really involved in the story – trying to work out who the murderer is… then finding out on the last page.

Above all, that it’s not to do with scanning, with quick reading, when they’re reading literature.

Question 2

literature

Answer 2

written works including novels, poetry and plays which are considered to have artistic value.
literature – written works such as novels, poems or plays which are thought to have artistic merit.

Above all, that it’s not to do with scanning, with quick reading, when they’re reading literature. … it’s automatic but when literature begins to do something more complicated than that in an area that emotionally you care about.

Question 3

hemisphere

Answer 3

half of a sphere, usually the earth or the brain.
hemisphere – a word meaning ‘half a sphere’

The brain begins to work from different parts, from a different hemisphere and it gets excited, it gets pre-emotional – you can see the brain coming to life…

Question 4

coming to life

Answer 4

starting to be activated after a quiet period.

The brain begins to work from different parts, from a different hemisphere and it gets excited, it gets pre-emotional – you can see the brain coming to life and it’s that life that is important in terms of these reading groups.
it’s this ‘coming to life’ that proves the therapeutic effects of ‘Bibliotherapy’

Question 5

scalp

Answer 5

skin under the hair on your head.

There are two methods really – you can have ECG where you put electrodes on the scalp and it measures electricity so that you can have a print-off of a graph of the sudden leaps than can happen at particular moments in reading a poem …

Question 6

stimulus

Answer 6

something that encourages activity in people or things.
stimulus – something that encourages activity in people.

… short story or you can go into the scanner, the FMRI, and there, the blood flow, the oxygen indicates again changes in the configuration of the brain as it takes in this new stimulus.
In contrast to scanning – reading quickly to find facts – reading groups use literature as a stimulus -