We’re reading less. And it’s making us stupid
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Why are we reading less despite the rise of BookTok and book‑related trends?
This is The Guardian.
It's summer holiday season. You might be packing that pile of books by your bed but will you actually get through them? Despite the rise of BookTok, pop stars launching book clubs, and films like The Odyssey inspiring us to return to the source material, surveys and studies show each year we're reading less. And it's led some to suggest we may even be entering a post-literate age. But what do we lose when we stop reading? Today, the benefits of being a bookworm. From The Guardian, I'm Madeleine Finlay, and this is Science Weekly. Ian, today you're going to tell me about the benefits of reading so that I feel horribly guilty every night when I pick up my phone instead of my book. But before we start, tell me about your relationship with reading and what book you're currently reading at the moment.
My relationship with reading? I mean, I suppose one way of putting it is enthusiastic, but quite slow. I can't... managed to read fast, which really annoys me. I don't read books at one time. I'll read one book at a time. The last one I finished recently was When We Cease to Understand the World by the Chilean author Benjamin Labatut. I'm reading a book called Brian at the moment, which is fantastic, by a guy called Jeremy Cooper. I'm going to finish Brian quite soon. The next one is Comedians by Graham Greene.
Okay, so you've got quite a stack going.
I've got far more. You know what
you're going to read next.
Yeah, I've bought far more books than I will read. I'm better at buying books than reading books.
How does learning to read reshape our brain networks and visual processing?
Yeah, I've got a very similar problem, Ian. I've got a shelf full of books that I definitely should have read and look forward to reading at some point, but haven't yet quite got round to. Now, we're going to talk about the benefits of reading. And there are obviously some big benefits in terms of being literate in comparison to being illiterate, you know, navigating the world, access to information. But just to start off, how has literacy changed our brains?
So one place I guess you could start with this is by looking at what's called the Flynn effect. So James Flynn was a philosopher and a psychologist. And he found that in the 20th century, there was this really steady and substantial rise in IQ. So if you looked at like 100 years ago, IQ rose pretty much 30 points over that period. So the question becomes, well, why? Nothing is going to happen genetically over that period of time. So what could be at work? Well, obviously, you could look at things like nutrition. Our nutrition has changed a lot in 100 years. But chiefly, education. Education has been a massive thing over the past 100 years. And if you think, well, okay, but what is it about education? Well,
The core, I guess, of education is literacy and at the core of literacy is learning to read. And so that is like maybe a pretty good starting point to look at as to what literacy has been doing for our brains.
And when we learn to read and write, the very first thing we have to master is the alphabet. And as any parent, teacher, recipient of a card from a niece or nephew knows, it's not the easiest thing to do, right? It takes some time. So what does figuring out all these shapes do for us?
What memory advantages do readers gain compared with non‑readers?
So I put this question to a guy called Falk Hertig and he's an experimental psychologist and he's at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands. He's done a lot of research into literacy and cognition and he particularly works in India where there's actually quite a high rate of illiteracy, about sort of one in five. He was really interesting because he was saying actually if you look at the English language there's quite a lot of things where you have to pay very close attention to these symbols. And in particular, there are mirror symbols. So, you know, B and D, obviously, are mirror symbols. And so when you're learning to read, you have to be able to unpick and distinguish between these two.
And at first, we're really bad at that. You know, one argument might be that we haven't really evolved the kinds of brains to be able to sort a B from a D. Like, why on earth would we have?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
Why are we reading less despite the rise of BookTok and book‑related trends?
0:00–2:04
2
How does learning to read reshape our brain networks and visual processing?
2:04–4:01
3
What memory advantages do readers gain compared with non‑readers?
4:01–6:38
4
How does regular reading strengthen logical reasoning and abstract thinking?
6:38–8:58
5
What evidence shows a decline in reading habits across the UK and US?
8:58–11:22
6
Could reduced reading lead to a post‑literate society and lower cognitive scores?
11:22–14:33
7
Why might the Flynn effect be reversing as reading rates drop?
14:33–17:19
8
How can we revive the habit of reading to protect our cognition?
17:19–19:51
Speakers
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