How Reading Benefits the Brain - The Cognitive Advantages of a Reading Habit
What Happens in the Brain While You Read
Reading looks like a passive activity, but for the brain it is an intensely active process. The visual cortex that recognizes letters, the Wernicke and Broca areas that process language, the temporal lobe that extracts meaning, and the prefrontal cortex that pictures scenes all fire at the same time. In an experiment reported by Emory University in 2013, participants worked through a single novel over 9 days, and resting-state fMRI scans taken the following mornings repeatedly showed increased connectivity in the brain. Changes in the regions involved in narrative comprehension and perspective taking faded quickly once the book was finished, while changes in the regions that handle bodily sensation lingered for several days after the last page.
When the material is a story, the mirror neuron system activates so that the reader can live through the characters' actions and emotions. Read a scene in which the protagonist runs and the motor cortex responds; read a scene of pain and the somatosensory cortex responds. Reading is a sophisticated cognitive activity that runs simulations inside the brain, and it exercises the whole cortical network.
How Reading Eases Stress
One strength of reading is that it needs no equipment and no particular place, and it can start in a gap of a few minutes. By the time you have turned a few pages and entered the story, the tightness in your shoulders and the shallowness of your breathing have often loosened without your noticing. The mechanism behind this is a shift in where attention goes.
Under stress the brain processes threat-related information over and over, but once you are absorbed in reading, attentional resources move toward the world of the story and awareness pulls away from the source of stress. This is called cognitive escape, and although the effect is temporary, it breaks the chain of the stress response. Reading before bed works especially well, since it lets you enter a relaxed state while avoiding the blue light of a smartphone. Reading is one of the most accessible and effective ways to cope with stress.
Empathy and the Development of Theory of Mind
Reading literary work improves the ability to understand other people's minds, known as theory of mind. In 5 experiments reported by researchers at the New School for Social Research in 2013, participants who read literary fiction scored higher on a test that asks people to read emotions from the eyes than participants who read nonfiction or popular fiction. What the paper claims, though, is limited to a temporary lift measured right after reading. It is not evidence that one reading session permanently improves how well you understand others.
Literary work portrays the inner life of its characters in complex ways and pushes the reader to infer what this person is thinking and feeling. Repeating that cognitive work trains interpersonal understanding in daily life. Experiencing the perspectives of many different characters is practice at picturing someone whose background and values differ from your own as an individual rather than as a representative of a category.
Vocabulary and Cognitive Function
There is a strong positive correlation between how much a person reads and the size of their vocabulary. The words acquired through reading include abstract concepts and specialized terms that rarely come up in everyday conversation, and they widen both the precision and the range of thought. People with a rich vocabulary can put their own emotions and ideas into words more accurately, which raises the quality of their communication.
The act of working through a long text is itself training for working memory. It is a continuous task of turning the sentence in front of you into meaning while still holding on to a character or a piece of foreshadowing that appeared dozens of pages earlier. That capacity feeds directly into problem solving and decision making at work.
Reading and the Prevention of Dementia
A long-term reading habit works in the direction of lower dementia risk. In a follow-up study reported by Rush University in 2007 that tracked more than 700 people for up to 5 years, people in the bottom 10% for intellectual activities such as reading developed Alzheimer's disease at 2.6 times the rate of those in the top 10%.
The concept of cognitive reserve explains this effect. The rich neural network built through reading works as a buffer against the brain atrophy that comes with age. Even when part of the brain is damaged, alternative pathways can keep cognitive function running. Cognitive reserve depends on what has accumulated since youth, so establishing a reading habit early protects the health of your brain later. Reading is the best investment you can make against the aging of the brain.
Paper Books and E-books Affect the Brain Differently
What stays with you after you finish differs a little between a paper book and an e-book. In an experiment reported by the University of Stavanger in Norway in 2019, 50 people read a 28-page mystery either as a paperback or on an e-reader. Most measures of comprehension showed no difference between the two groups, and only on the task of tracing the order of events and the passage of time did the paper readers come out ahead.
Paper books provide spatial cues. Physical information such as the thickness of the pages, your position in the book, and the left and right halves of a spread helps memory settle. E-books, by contrast, lose those spatial cues to scrolling, so the location of a piece of information stays vague. E-books have their own advantages, though, including adjustable font size and built-in dictionaries, so the best approach is to use each format where it fits.
A Practical Approach to Building a Reading Habit
Getting the benefits of reading requires turning it into a lasting habit. For busy people today, though, finding time to read is not easy. The trick to effective habit formation is to lower the barrier as far as it will go.
Start with 10 minutes a day. Simply giving the 10 minutes before sleep to a book instead of a smartphone produces more than 60 hours of reading a year. Keep a book within easy reach at all times and put 1 in your commuting bag. Setting a rule that you may stop partway through if a book turns out not to interest you takes the pressure out of reading. Building reading into your daily life lets you gain brain health and emotional stability at the same time.
What Reading Does to a Life Over Time
The effects of reading do not stop at better cognitive function. Living through a wide range of experiences at second hand prepares you psychologically for the difficulties of your own life. Stories in which characters overcome adversity raise the reader's own resilience.
Reading is also a way to enrich time spent alone. When loneliness sets in, the characters in a book become quiet companions and provide a sense of social connection. The knowledge and perspectives gained through reading widen the range of your conversations and enrich your relationships. Reading is not entertainment with an immediate payoff, but it is a habit that reliably raises the quality of a life over the long run.