The brain is an engineering system

From the October, 2009 Popular Mechanics' article 4 People Who Faced Disaster by John Galvin:

"The brain is an engineering system," says John Leach, a former Royal Air Force combat survival instructor who now works with the Norwegian military on survival training and research. "Like any engineering system, it has limits in terms of what it can process and how fast it can do so. We cope by taking in information about our environment, and then building a model of that environment. We don't respond to our environment, but to the model of our environment." If there's no model, the brain tries to create one, but there's not enough time for that during an emergency. Operating on an inadequate mental model, disaster victims often fail to take the actions needed to save their own lives.

I wonder if this is why enthusiastic readers are able, on average, to achieve such markedly higher outcomes in terms of education, income, etc.? The hypothesis would be that through frequent and broad reading, their minds create a large volume of off-the-shelf models for all sorts of situations (emergency, social, career, etc.) and therefore are able to respond faster and with greater probability of success. It would be consistent with our Reading Hamburger model.