What Do Poems, Scriptures and Sutras Do for the Brain and for Memory?

In grandma’s last days there were only two things that still reached her, even when she was very tired: sweet potato, and Truyện Kiều.

Over the final three days, as she spoke less and less, I read Truyện Kiều to her and her lips would move along with it; ask her about anything else and she could barely answer any more.

She must have had beautiful memories of it, and I am so grateful that in the days when she was young and could not read, someone read to her, and read her poems until she knew them by heart.

My cousin and I were born on the same day of the same month of the same year, and from the time we could first read, grandma would ask the two of us to read a little book of prayers, the Kinh Kỳ Cầu. To this day, more than 20 years on, both of us still know it by heart — sitting on grandma’s bed, reading it through all those days and months…

Is that not the simplest and the most important thing we can do for the people we love — for children, for parents, for grandparents?

I follow Hong Dinh, a teacher now living in the United States, and she wrote a piece about the effect of Sanskrit and about neuroscience. The Sanskrit effect is a term coined by the neuroscientist James Hartzell after a study of 21 Sanskrit scholars, men deeply versed in the Vedas of India. One of the study’s conclusions points to a link between reciting scripture and chanting mantras in particular — or reading aloud and repeating long texts in general — and a strengthening of memory and of the capacity to think. The study was small in scale, but it opens up many questions for future neuroscience: whether, for instance, memorising and chanting mantras or ancient texts might lessen the damage of Alzheimer’s disease.

“IF YOU LOVE SOMEONE, READ FOR THEM!”