Assessment
Why Reading Is Great for Your Brain
The surprising health benefits of being a bookworm
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- Reading books helps improve brain function and may even add years to your life.
- Reading fiction may offer more brain benefits than reading nonfiction.
- Literary fiction, in particular, may enhance feelings of empathy, a boon for your social life.
Want to improve your brain function? A library card may be your new best friend. Research suggests that reading books can make your brain work better and may even lengthen your life.
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Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health tested this idea using data from the long-running Health and Retirement Study at the University of Michigan. More than 3,600 people ages 50 and older were surveyed about their reading and other habits and given baseline cognition tests. Researchers followed up with them regularly for up to 12 years. The findings: Avid book readers not only scored higher on tests of memory and mental status — tests measuring decline in mental abilities — but they lived longer, too. Reading books an average of 30 minutes a day lowered the risk of mortality by 20 percent. The findings held up regardless of the participants’ age, gender, race, education, income and overall health.
Reading improves vocabulary and memory
The results weren’t too surprising, according to study author Avni Bavishi Ughreja, M.D., now a cardiovascular disease fellow at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Reading seems to engage the brain in various ways,” she says. “It improves vocabulary, imagination and critical thinking.”
Subsequent research shows that reading has other brain benefits. In a study involving 76 people ages 60 to 79 reported in 2022 in Frontiers in Psychology, participants assigned to leisure reading for 90 minutes a day, five times a week saw improvements in their verbal working memory and episodic memory, compared with a control group that did not read. What’s more, in a 2021 study of almost 2,000 people age 64 and older published in International Psychogeriatrics, frequent reading was linked to a reduced risk of cognitive decline over the 14-year study period, no matter the reader’s level of education.
Books appeared to be the superior reading material, Ughreja says. “Our findings were not nearly as robust when you looked at reading newspapers, magazines and periodicals.”
Your English lit teacher was right
Reading works of fiction may offer brain benefits that reading nonfiction does not. A 2024 review of studies in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that both reading fiction and lifetime exposure to print fiction led to significant — albeit small-sized — cognitive benefits. In a 2015 study published in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, which involved MRI brain scans, researchers showed that brain areas concerned with understanding narrative stories overlapped with those involved with empathy. And in earlier research at the University of Toronto, people who frequently read fiction were better able to empathize with others, or put themselves in others’ shoes.
David Kidd, a chief assessment scientist at Harvard University’s Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, isn’t sure why literary fiction enhances this brain function more than other book genres, but he says, “It may prompt you to slow down and think about what other people are experiencing.”
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