[sherkaner]

I feel that I read in a wrong way. My productivity and ability to think often plummets after reading fiction.

Could it be connected with vizualization? Do you visualize your characters, setting, predict what's going to happen, etc? Usually my eyes just skim over the descriptions of characters and scenery.

[1e-9]

Yes, I think visualization provides the key benefit. When I read something good, my imagination recreates the sights, sounds, smells, and experiences in great detail and tunes out the real world. I lose all awareness of the book's text and everything around me. It's like I "live in the story." This mental state can persist for hours, even in loud environments with high levels of activity around me. After I sleep following some deep reading, I notice a heightened ability to visualize a problem and run mental simulations of potential solutions. It's like I "live in the problem." Interestingly, when I have played video games with similarly high levels of focus, I have not realized work improvement afterwards. In fact, video games seem to degrade my work performance. I think that is because video games generate stress and do not stimulate nearly the same level of mental world-building that good fiction does.