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Robert Tamayo

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Immersion

Immersion is a powerful tool for passive transformation. To be immersed in something is to be completely and fully engaged in it. Every day, we are immersed in something, and whatever that is will slowly transform us as our bodies and minds adapt to our environment.

What we choose to immerse ourselves in will have a profound effect on our minds. If we immerse ourselves in good content, we will transform our minds for the better. If we immerse ourselves in trashy content, our minds will become garbage.

I've noticed this effect on myself recently. I've been reading what would be considered literary books for a good portion of the first two months of this year. A few weeks into this practice, I noticed that my daily speech had changed. I was using words that I've always known, but that I had also always avoided previously. I knew that these words were not common in daily conversations, and so I had never used them. However, as my immersion in literature became more complete, I had started to use some of these words in daily conversations. They were no longer strange words only found in books; they were just the words that I was reading for hours a day.

That was an example of a good effect of immersion. Another good example would be my recent studies of Latin; after a few weeks, I would fall asleep thinking about new vocabulary, noun cases, verb conjugations, and all of the connections I had made between Latin and Spanish.

A bad effect of immersion would be how I feel when I play too much of a video game.

After spending hours and hours playing a new game, I'm noticing that my mind is starting to adopt different patterns of thinking. This time, they aren't exactly beneficial. I may actually have become less erudite after having played dozens of hours of games than I was before. Video games have a different effect on me. When I'm immersed in games, I start to think about different strategies and possibilities in the game. My mind starts to visualize spatial reasoning differently. I also tend to have "flashes" of the game's content or similar things appearing in my thoughts. 

It's not exactly as beneficial and healthy as when I spent all my time reading.
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