There is growing interest in the way we read. Much of this is fuelled by research published in recent years suggesting that reading can make us smarter and perhaps even lead to a longer and healthier life.
Last year, a team at the University of Copenhagen reported that reading for as little as 10 minutes a day can strengthen our brain. A study at Ohio State University found that reading for a short period every day could improve working memory — our ability to store and process information. And at Oxford University, scientists have shown that doing simple reading drills could actually improve the speed of your cognitive decline.
What is the evidence behind these claims? Science often fails us by rarely being as simple as the headlines suggest. So it’s worth taking a step back and asking: how does reading actually affect the brain?
Reading the newspaper
Reading the newspaper is a classic example of reading for pleasure. Studies have consistently found that reading the newspaper is associated with benefits such as helping us make sense of confusing information and gaining better understanding of complex topics. These benefits might include understanding political news, being better able to detect lies in the news or spotting when someone’s feeling guilty or scared in an article.
Although reading the newspaper regularly might seem like a bad idea, this is actually quite an surprising result because the effect is small and the benefit tends to dissipate after a few days. Also, many people do not read the newspaper — just the sports pages — and this cannot account for the results. In fact, the effect is so small that the research has come up with alternative explanations such as the possibility that people might be responding to the experience of reading the newspaper as a social activity and as a form of entertainment.
Preliminary studies suggest that reading the news can improve our ability to process and remember information, although it may be that news articles contain more misleading information than more general-interest pieces. The most recent study, published in July, suggested that people who read the newspaper are less likely to share information that conflicts with their views and they are also less likely to change their minds once they are made up. This supports the idea that reading the newspaper could be linked with