Connectomes

I wasn't always bookish. When I was a teenager I was very much the opposite. It wasn't until I saw the connection between my innate creative urge and what books have to offer.  

The way that my mind is connected naturally connects to information in books. I am also a very nonlinear reader: Essentially what I'm looking for are connections to things I'm always thinking about. (Hypertext highly enables this in all of us). If you consider the sphere of influence as a kind of universe,  that universe is always expanding out based upon the volume of connections within it.  There is really nothing outside of that universe--and there shouldn't be.  We all exist in this kind of protective bubble, which is created beginning in the first ten years of your life. By the end of our life, there is quite a large bubble,  but the density of information within them can vary. Even if there is a lot of informational volume within your information universe, it could be largely disconnected--like everyone having a modem but not connecting to the entire internet. One of the things that books and reading do are to reconnect those things. The wider the vocabulary (not only words) the more connection points are possible. The question becomes why people choose not to fully connect their individual universes. The other framework for thinking about this is the informational Multiverse, in which tribes create their own universe--and within that Universe, there are rules of what and what not to connect. In that scenario, it could be "just because you can doesn't mean you should.", and rather, "ignore everything except this". In essence, you put yourself in a box, and not a Universe of information.