Everyone's a Read Head / by Kate Bezar

I thought perhaps the best, and most polite, place to start would be to introduce myself. I am the editor and publisher of a quarterly journal of sorts called 'Dumbo feather, pass it on'. I have absolutely no qualifications to be an editor or publisher, but apparently being both qualifies me to write something for the 'literary' section of Mao & More.

I'm going to begin with a topic close to my heart - the importance of being conscious of what we read. The blooming organic movement is evidence enough that w e're becoming more and more conscious of what we put into our bodies, but I don't believe we're conscious enough of what we put into our minds. Read shallow gossip mags and you'll find yourself bitching about colleagues and rumour-mongering. Read high-end fashion mags and soon you'll start behaving too-cool-for-school. Read Mills & Boon and you'll find yourself waiting anxiously for tall, dark and ever-so-spunky to canter up the drive on his black thoroughbred.

This only really struck me as I read Malcolm Gladwell's second book, 'Blink'. It is nowhere near in the same league as his first ground-breaking book, 'The Tipping Point' (which recently got him a nomination as one of Time Magazine's 100 most influential people in April 2005), but Blink has some pearls.

In Blink, Gladwell cites numerous examples of social experiments conducted to gain some understanding of the power of our subconscious. In one such experiment by psychologist John Bargh, the subjects were asked to unscramble sets of five words to make complete sentences. Sprinkled through the sets were words like 'worried', 'lonely', 'wrinkle' and 'forgetful'. Unbelievably, subjects walked away from doing the test slower than they had walked to it. They had been 'primed' to think about the state of being old and it had a direct impact on their behaviour. In an experiment by Dutch researchers, two groups were asked to answer 42 Trivial Pursuit questions. The difference between the two otherwise equivalent groups was that beforehand one group was asked to think about what it would mean to be a professor and write down everything that came to mind. In contrast, the other group was asked to first think about being soccer hooligans. The 'professors' outscored the 'hooligans' by over 13% on the subsequent Trivial Pursuit questions. There is little doubt that what we see, read and process cognitively has a direct impact on our behaviour and our lives.

It made me think consciously about what I'd unconsciously been doing for over a year. It was over a year ago that Dumbo feather was born out of my frustration at the lack of reading material I deemed worthy of putting into my head. As I looked at the overwhelming array of magazines in a newsagent one stormy night, I saw nothing that wouldn't either insult my intelligence or bore me stupid, severely damage my body image and encourage me to do the same to my credit card, or just fill my head with rubbish. There was nothing to warm the cockles of my spirit, challenge my thinking, introduce me to new wonderful ideas and entertain me with real life tales. So, in a moment of complete wanton stupidity I decided to create it instead. You might well ask, "What had I been reading earlier that day?". I can't remember.

Think about it.