The brain plays a pivotal role in the body, feeling emotions, thinking reasonably, and giving orders to different parts of the body. Just as exercises strengthen the muscles and make a strong body, the brain can become healthy when it is consistently stimulated and moves.
The best exercise for the brain is reading. When the Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging [fMRI] measures the brain of a person who is focused on reading, it shows a lot of blood is supplied to the whole brain. It means that the whole brain becomes activated. In fact, reading requires a complex thinking. You imagine something in the process of understanding a sentence you just read with your eyes, think of your old memories, infer and predict something; the brain works actively and independently when you read. Since the brain doesn’t distinguish an imagination from the reality, reading causes various responses such as visual, olfactory, and tactile senses as well as the motor sense. For example, if you read the sentence, “He kicked the ball,” the motor cortex is activated; and if you read a word related with fragrance such as coffee or soap, the olfactory cortex is activated.
Thus, although the body stays still while reading a book, the brain runs around excitedly in the field opened by the book. In addition, you get new knowledge and information.