Reading is not an innate biological function; it is an acquired set of skills—one of the greatest inventions of the human species, second only to fire. Dating back only 6,000 years, literacy began simply as a way to tally vessels or sheep, but with the development of alphabetic systems, it became an efficient means of storing and sharing knowledge. This skill literally changes the brain, exploiting a design principle that allows new connections to form between visual, language, thought, and emotion centers. In essence, every new reader must create a brand new neural circuit in their brain.
The Gifts of Deep Reading
The benefits of reading are profound, extending far beyond mere entertainment. Reading has many therapeutic benefits, with practices like "bibliotherapy" prescribing fiction to alleviate ailments from claustrophobia to rage. More broadly, reading grants three magical powers: creativity, intelligence, and empathy. It is one of the key factors linked to a child's later economic success, with readers being more likely to vote, own a home, and avoid incarceration.
When reading for enjoyment, the brain enters a meditative state, slowing the heartbeat, calming the nervous system, and reducing anxiety. Crucially, the quality of reading matters:
Surface Reading involves merely extracting information.
Deep Reading utilizes far more of the cerebral cortex, enabling the reader to make complex analogies, inferences, and critical analyses. It is this deep reading that allows us to be truly analytic, empathic, and human.
The Screen Inferiority Effect
Today, the "book" is simply a delivery mechanism, and the novel is evolving. New digital mediums, particularly phones, are democratizing storytelling, giving a voice to new writers outside the traditional publishing bottleneck. However, this shift comes with a cognitive cost.
Research on the impact of digitization on reading has identified a "screen inferiority" effect. While short news updates and simple information can be read equally well on a smartphone, when tackling content that is cognitively or emotionally challenging, reading on a screen leads to poorer comprehension than reading on paper.
The true problem is not how much we read, but how we read. The sheer volume of digital content promotes a propensity toward skimming. Because the reading brain has a plastic circuitry, the circuit adapts to the characteristics of the medium. If we don't actively train the capacities required for deep reading, we risk losing the ability to understand complex content, and perhaps even the capacity to fully engage and imagine.
Towards a Biliterate Future
The human imagination is flexible, and we will find ways to adapt. We are already seeing trends toward shorter books and story collections, as writers adjust to shorter attention spans and more visual content. The hope is that we can cultivate a biliterate brain, capable of efficiently reading both on screens and paper.
The key moving forward is discipline: we must consciously choose the medium best suited for the content we are reading. By doing so, we ensure that we do not lose the extraordinary gifts—the knowledge, the empathy, and the humanity—that reading has given our species. To stop reading, as some experts warn, would be to fundamentally diminish the human experience.
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