Living in Our Imaginations

How do Americans spend their leisure time? The answer might surprise you. The most common voluntary activity is not eating, drinking alcohol, or taking drugs. It is not socializing with friends, participating in sports, or relaxing with the family. While people sometimes describe sex as their most pleasurable act, time-management studies find that the average American adult devotes just four minutes per day to sex. ... Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real. When we are free to do whatever we want, we retreat to the imagination—to worlds created by others, as with books, movies, video games, and television (over four hours a day for the average American), or to worlds we ourselves create, as when daydreaming and fantasizing. While citizens of other countries might watch less television, studies in England and the rest of Europe find a similar obsession with the unreal.

Paul Bloom, professor of psychology at Yale University and the author of the forthcoming book, How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like looks at why it is we spend so much time in our imaginations, including reading novels. This fascinating piece is based on one of the chapters of the book.

Bibliotherarapy

Can literature sort out your life problems? A group of authors including Alain de Botton have set up a "cultural apothecary" to dispenses bibliotherapy to those who need it :

On offer at the School of Life: books; artwork; holidays; courses; food; sermons; and – most popular of all – "bibliotherapy". Split over ground floor and basement, the building offers a sanctuary where visitors can read, relax and think for themselves.

The bookshop also offers intriguing weekend trips :

De Botton, who six years ago published The Art of Travel, will take customers to Heathrow, where they can expect a guided tour of the new terminal, meet baggage staff and chat to plane spotters – all for £250. Another holiday will feature a tour of the "great tarmac institution" of the M1, promising meetings with "architects and historians, artists and truckers".

More on the shop's website and on the School of Life blog.

A Book at Bedtime

Parents, do you you want to give your pre-school kids a head start? Guardian science correspondent James Randerson, writes that researchers who have reviewed studies on the effects of reading have found that sharing a bedtime story with your kids :

... promotes their motor skills, through learning to turn the pages, and their memory. It also improves their emotional and social development. ... children who are read to from an earlier age have better language development and tend to have better language scores later in life. Most important ... is that reading aloud is a period of shared attention and emotion between parent and child. This reinforces reading as a pleasurable activity.

(The original article appeared in the journal Archives of Disease in Childhood.)

Sadly, I think many parents here don't read to their children. Sometimes because they just don't have time. (Or is that an excuse?) But I suspect more often because they were not read to themselves as children - so it feels a bit strange to strike out and do things differently.

And they may not actually know how to go about it. (A friend of mine, Saradha, is actually a college lecturer who gives lessons to parents in how to read to their kids! And yes, they need it.) There's some useful advice here and here.

Or they may not know what to read. (Do drop by Daphne's blog for reading suggestions.)

So let's do a quick poll - were you read to as a kid? And if you have them - what are you reading to your kids?

After thought :

I wonder - is bedtime reading less common here because kids here don't really have a regular , set bed-time as they do in the West where most kids are packed off really early? Anyway, there's no need to read to kids just at bed-time ...

(Picture by Vanessa Cabban and nicked from here.)