I must admit that I find it honestly laughable and pathetic that people are not able to identify the benefits of reading. Reading makes you smarter in large par

I must admit that I find it honestly laughable and pathetic that people are not able to identify the benefits of reading. Reading makes you smarter in large part from the information contained within the book that you learn by reading it, not from some kind of abstract mental exercise you get from looking at words. If you wish to exercise yourself mentally, you would play video games. Yet despite the high cognitive effort of them, no one attributes to games this great enlightenment that supposedly comes from reading. This is because games do not confer any practical information to the player where a book might to the reader.