Why Reading Changes the Way You Think

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Reading changes the way we think.

[00:00:02]Reading changes the actual patterns of thought that we use to interpret the world around us. Years after reading Donna Tart's The Goldfinch, there's one character, Theo Decker, I still can't quite get out of my head, and I think the reason has something to do with what reading does to the mind. What's really cool about reading is that you're not just some spectator observing things from the outside. In a way, your mind is actively participating in what's happening. There's research suggesting that when we read about physical sensations or actions, some of the same areas of the brain that are connected to those experiences can become active, too. Just think about any story you've read recently. You probably don't remember looking at the words that are on the page. Instead, you remember the imagined experiences that those words created. And I think something similar happens when we read about people. For hours on end, you get to see, uh, kind of the logic behind the choices that the characters make. You know, even though they may not be the kinds of choices that you would make, you still have access to, like, the inner workings of their minds. You're thinking about their whole life. You're thinking about what they want, what makes them happy, you know, what they fear. And after a while, their inner life starts to feel strangely familiar to you. Which brings me to Theo Decker in Donna Tart's The Goldfinch. Now, Theo, unfortunately, makes a lot of choices that, from the outside, they seem almost nonsensical.

[00:01:37]You know, he's self-destructive. Uh, he lies, and he steals, and, uh, he even becomes an addict. And as the story builds, he keeps making decisions that really just make him more and more unhappy. So, from the outside, it's easy to look at him and think, you know, why would somebody do this? You know, why wouldn't he just tell someone or ask for help? You know, it's like he's trying to ruin his life on purpose. But once you're inside of the story, once you're inside of his mind, you realize that there's a lot of guilt and trauma behind all of the really terrible and unfortunate choices that he makes. But even when those choices are destructive in some way, you can understand there's a kind of uh emotional logic to it all.

[00:02:26]And that, I think, is the clearest example of how reading can actually change your thinking. You know, the more time that you spend inside these unfamiliar minds, the more flexible that your own mind and your own thoughts become. This is one of the reasons why reading is so strongly linked to empathy because it trains you to imagine why someone else's choices might seem reasonable, at least to them. Now, if you don't know, in The Goldfinch, Theo's mother is killed in a blast while they're looking at a painting. And as Theo carries himself out of the rubble, he ends up stealing that painting. By the way, that's the premise, it's not a spoiler, so don't worry. Anyway, he carries this painting with him throughout the whole story. And I was thinking recently about how, you know, on one level, it's just a painting, but on another level, it's so much more than that. In one way, it's a burden, and at the same time, it's also this object of beauty.

[00:03:23]And it makes so much sense now that Theo would so closely associate his feelings towards the painting with his mother.

[00:03:31]And this is why he continues to hold on to it despite all of the risk and despite all of the trouble that it gives him because it represents how he is holding on to the past. And I think that this gets at another way that reading changes the way we think. It improves the mind's capacity for abstraction. And by that, I mean that it improves our ability to look at one specific thing and then through that see a larger pattern behind it. When you're reading a novel, you're constantly reading about the specific details like maybe someone's voice or maybe the setting or something like this. And you're always just trying to understand, you know, what does it mean on a larger level? So, you start with something concrete like a painting and then your mind begins to connect it in a more universal sense.

[00:04:22]And fiction is filled with this, you know, the the marlin in The Old Man and the Sea.

[00:04:27]It's just a fish in one sense, but it eventually comes to represent struggle and maybe even dignity. Or I also think about the way the father and son talk about fire in McCarthy's The Road. In several places, they talk about carrying the fire and that connects to larger ideas about hope and civilization.

[00:04:48]It represents the idea of carrying the light against the darkness of the world.

[00:04:53]But throughout the novel, we're constantly being reminded that fire is also what destroyed the world. And that is a really interesting idea. You know, the one thing that can save humanity was also the thing that destroyed it. So many things in life are like this, like technology. You know, we use it to communicate or to learn, but it can also manipulate us and maybe even accelerate our destruction. So, when we read, we practice moving between the specific and the universal. And so, reading about the details of a character's life, it enables us to start thinking about human life in a more general sense. And once you start thinking this way in fiction, you start doing it elsewhere, too. You look at how things happen in your life, maybe it's a a meeting at work or maybe it's a relationship that you have. And you begin to think about what larger pattern it belongs to. Sometimes I think about the very simple things that I do with my family, You know, just making dinner, chopping vegetables, you know, getting my daughters to set the table.

[00:05:51]On one level you could think of this is just the mundane sort of family routine that might otherwise go unnoticed or maybe even completely forgotten. But on another level, to me it's a larger pattern of care and family and you know, just making fun memories with the people that matter the most. And maybe it would be otherwise forgotten. You know, sometimes I think that maybe I wouldn't even think about these things if reading wasn't a big part of my life. And and I guess that right there, that awareness, it's yet another way that reading changes our thinking. You know, all of the stories that we read, they're really just mirrors and the more we read, the more we're able to see ourselves in them. And maybe that's why a character like Theo Decker has stayed in my mind for all these years. You know, his life, all the things he did, it's not valuable to me in the sense that it's just some bullet list of information that I'm trying to learn or memorize.

[00:06:47]Theo Decker has stayed with me because through him I'm able to see something important about being human being.