Reading Tips
Why Reading Books the Wrong Way Won’t Deepen Your Thinking
No matter how hard you train.
No matter how hard you train in the wrong way, you won’t grow as an athlete, reading thousands of books the wrong way won’t deepen your thinking, insight, or insight. Just as there are strength exercises that give you the most strength with the least effort, there are reading styles that give you the most insight with the least amount of effort.
In fact, there are many people who read a lot of books but end up feeling idle, and there are also people who make amazing progress after reading just a few books. What exactly is the difference?
People often say that “understanding the logical structure of the text is the most important thing,” but depending on the type of text, this fixed idea can become a cancer.
It is certainly necessary to understand the logical structure, but if you try to read the text with this as a priority, you will often end up making futile misreadings and not understanding the most important part.
I think the most important thing to do is to activate the emotional circuits of the author and characters in your own brain. Put yourself in the shoes of the author or characters, imagine the world as seen through their eyes, and try to experience the suffocation, frustration, irrationality, and anger that the author and characters felt.
It is also the great pain that comes from the height of the author and the characters, the weight of their bodies, and the distortion of their posture, and the vivid sensation of writhing and aching in their own muscles, bones, joints, stomach, intestines, and various internal organs.
The discomfort of clothes sticking to your skin due to sweat, the pain of being groped and held down, the frustration of not being able to resist, the details of the various things you can see and touch are so vivid that you can feel as if you are experiencing it right now. In other words, it is about “getting into” the author and characters and experiencing the various emotions that arise there as one’s own.
The important thing here is to simulate the emotions of all the characters and authors that appear in the text, either in parallel or switching between them, so sincerely that your brain bleeds. Simulating only the parts of the emotions of your favorite characters or authors that you can easily empathize with is nothing more than mental masturbation. You have to put yourself in the body, position, and feelings of the author or character you feel disgusted or repulsed by, and experience the world as seen from that perspective.
If you can do this kind of emotional simulation properly, the logical structure of a sentence will emerge naturally without much effort. It also allows you to see the logical structure much more precisely than simply following the logical skeleton.
For example, when reading a book on tax filing and tax audit preparation, it becomes much easier to read if you simulate the emotions of the author, tax accountant, tax officer, tax chief, bureaucrat, or politician who created laws and tax systems.
Behind the creation of the tax system, human emotions are writhing, and the tax offices and tax accountants who administer the tax system are also writhing with emotions and human drama. Even when reading a philosophy book, you can understand the logic much more intuitively if you simulate the emotions of the philosopher who wrote the book.
Philosophers are people who are driven by their own emotions and have established a philosophy as a result of pursuing logic based on extremely personal feelings. Even in economics textbooks, if you do simulations of the emotions of the characters that appear in the explanations of comparative advantage and marginal productivity, you will be able to understand them more easily and deepen your understanding.
On the contrary, the limits of economic theory are felt firsthand. Economic phenomena are, in the first place, created by human emotions. First of all, what is the fundamental reason why emotional simulation is important for understanding the logical structure of sentences?
This is because all meaning and value ultimately derive from emotion, not logic. Logic that completely ignores emotions is literally meaningless logic.
The ability to simulate emotions is almost the same as the ability to read the atmosphere. Therefore, reading for people who cannot read the atmosphere tends to be empty and barren. When you read a book, you have to read the atmosphere inside the book. If you don’t read the atmosphere inside the book, you haven’t really read the book.
As long as you read books in this way, no matter how many thousands of books you read, you will only accumulate knowledge and information in your brain, without deepening your thinking, insight, or insight. I don’t change.
Also, simulating other people’s emotions in your own brain often works against the force that is trying to protect your ego, so it often destroys you and causes you to bleed. Simulating other people’s emotions is often unpleasant and painful for people who are not used to it. So it’s no wonder that many people unconsciously avoid this.
In the first place, because we let other people’s foreign emotions infiltrate our own emotions, interspecies interbreeding occurs and our own minds become fertile and grow, and we are only automatically reproducing our own past emotions, one’s mind becomes unidirectional and remains poor.
Just as the diversity of the gene pool is important, the diversity of the meme pool in your own brain is important, but if you read a lot of books while neglecting emotional simulation, the skeleton of the meme without the meat of emotion becomes like a skeleton dance in your head.
Also, reading a book while simulating emotions does not mean that you will be swept away and brainwashed by the author’s emotions. Rather, by capturing the author’s emotions more precisely through emotional simulation, it is possible to think in opposition to those emotions.
And, as you might expect, emotional simulation is crucially important not just for reading, but for various aspects of work, life, and play. There is often a huge difference in quality between projects created through emotional simulation and those that are not.
Whether it’s sales or negotiation, people who are good at emotional simulation achieve excellent results and quickly advance in the ranks. If you can simulate realistic and vivid emotions, the quality of sex and masturbation will improve significantly.
Also, although emotional simulation may seem expensive at first glance, it is actually not. If you get into the habit of simulating emotions when reading a text, the emotional simulation will eventually start automatically as a conditioned reflex, and the cost will not be much different from reading text normally.
On the contrary, when I read a novel, I feel deeply immersed in the material, feel the cold, hard texture of the glass vividly, hear the sound of glass breaking in real life, feel the pain of glass shards stabbing my hands, and the throbbing pain.
At the same time, the blood drips down, the feeling of relief at the arrival of help makes me slump, tears of relief start to come out, and my enjoyment deepens. I don’t feel like my reading speed is particularly slow.
The more you do emotional simulation, the more your circuits become stronger, your speed increases, and your images become clearer. Sometimes I even get confused as to whether the memory was something I experienced in real life or something I simulated through an emotional simulation when I read a book.
It feels like other parts of the brain are working in parallel, and the amount of brain activity as a whole is probably increasing, but the amount of mental growth per unit time is clearly increasing. Also, reading is not necessarily done to grow.
It’s normal for people to read a variety of books as their interests dictate, just for fun. However, even in such cases, if you get into the habit of unconsciously simulating your emotions while reading, you will be able to enjoy the book more deeply and richly.
The quality of the pleasure of reading itself will improve. In addition to that, as an unintended side effect, it also leads to your own spiritual growth, so I guess it’s all good.
If you spend ten years reading, working, living, and playing while consciously engaging in emotional simulation, the difference in ability between you and someone who spent the same ten years neglecting emotional simulation becomes decisive. Sometimes, it is possible to make a reversal that far outweighs even the differences in innate talent.
Emotional simulation is the ultimate life hack, and despite its simplicity, it has tremendous power that can fundamentally reshape human beings over a long period of time.






