In What Reading Slowly Taught Me, Jacqueline Woodson speaks about the reasons that she continues to read slowly despite being pushed to read faster. One of the reasons that she stated that really stood out to me was to “drown out the noise” of the world around her. Drowning out the outside noise allows us to immerse ourselves fully in the words of a book. It really allows us to feel emotionally connected to the characters and events of the book. In turn, it allows us to use reading as a way to learn and understand events of the past and experiences of those before us or as a way to escape reality. This resonates with me because I have always used books as a way to escape the reality of my world. As a child, I was always reading books about far off places and dreaming of them. Reading is what inspired me to travel the world, meet new people, and try new things.

When I first listened to “The Influence You Have” podcast, I had such a hard time writing the blog. Though my thoughts remain unchanged, I feel that I might have rushed through it the first time around and I realized that I wasn’t really looking at the different perspectives when it came to the shock experiments.  When hearing about the shock experiments, my initial reaction was to instantly judge the experimenter and question how someone could give such instructions. I never thought that maybe it was as anxiety filled for the experimenter to give the instructions as it was for the volunteer to follow them. It might have been the mention of Nazi Germany before the introduction of the study that made me think of the experimenter as “evil” but I realize now that it is important to understand all perspectives before jumping to conclusions and judgments.