Is Reading Good for You? What Science Says About Books

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6 Reasons Science Says you Should Read a Book

Is reading books actually good for you, or is that just something book lovers like to say? The honest answer is that the evidence is encouraging but uneven. Studies link regular reading with slower memory decline in old age, a longer life in some large surveys, and short-term changes in how the brain connects. The famous claim that one dose of literary fiction makes you more empathetic is less solid than headlines suggested, and some popular statistics about stress come from press releases rather than published research. Here is what six commonly cited findings really show, and how to make reading a habit that pays off.

1. A novel can leave a trace in the brain

In 2013, neuroscientist Gregory Berns and colleagues at Emory University asked 21 undergraduates to read the Robert Harris thriller Pompeii over nine evenings, about 30 pages at a time. Each following morning the students lay in an MRI scanner while resting, and the team compared those scans with scans taken before and after the reading period. The results appeared in the journal Brain Connectivity.

On the mornings after reading, connectivity rose in the left temporal cortex, an area tied to language, and in the central sulcus, the strip of brain that handles movement and bodily sensation. Some of the changes were still visible five days after the book was finished. Berns suggested that readers may partly "take on" the physical experience of a character, a kind of embodied imagination.

It is an elegant study, but a small one: one book, 21 students and no comparison group doing a different task. It shows that the brain responds to a story in measurable ways. It does not show that reading novels makes anyone a better person, which is how it was often summarised online.

2. Fiction and empathy: promising, but contested

The study that launched a thousand headlines came out in Science in 2013. Psychologists David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano ran five experiments in which adults read a short passage of literary fiction, popular fiction or non-fiction, then took tests of "theory of mind", the ability to work out what other people think and feel. The literary-fiction readers did better, especially on a test that asks people to judge emotions from photographs of eyes.

Later work has been much less clear. Several independent teams, including two in the Netherlands, repeated the experiment with the same kind of materials and found no reliable advantage for literary fiction. A large 2018 project that re-tested social-science results published in Nature and Science also listed it as not replicated. One 2018 replication did find a similar pattern, and the original authors' own preregistered follow-ups gave mixed results.

The fairer conclusion is that a single short passage probably does not change your social skills on the spot. Researchers who study lifelong reading habits still find that people who read a lot of fiction tend to score higher on measures of social understanding, but those studies cannot fully separate cause from effect: empathetic people may simply enjoy novels more.

3. Mental activity and the ageing brain

The strongest case for reading concerns memory in later life. In 2013, Robert S. Wilson and colleagues at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago published a study in Neurology that followed 294 older people with yearly tests of memory and thinking until they died. Participants had also described how often they read, wrote letters, visited libraries and did similar activities at different stages of life. After death, their brains were examined for the plaques, tangles and other damage linked to dementia.

People who had been more mentally active, both early and late in life, showed slower memory decline, even after the researchers accounted for the physical damage in their brains. Mental activity explained close to 15 percent of the differences in decline beyond what the brain changes predicted. In other words, the habit did not prevent damage, but it seemed to help the brain cope with it.

4. Reading and Alzheimer's risk: an association, not a guarantee

An older and often misquoted study appeared in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2001. Robert Friedland and colleagues at Case Western Reserve University compared people with Alzheimer's disease with people without it, asking about 26 leisure activities they had pursued between the ages of 20 and 60. Activities ranged from physical ones such as gardening, to intellectual ones such as reading and puzzles, to passive ones such as watching television.

People with Alzheimer's had been less active in midlife, particularly in intellectual pursuits, and news coverage at the time summarised the result as active people being roughly two and a half times less likely to develop the disease. Two cautions matter. The data relied on recollections, often reported by relatives, and the design cannot prove that reading protects the brain; very early, silent changes in the brain could also make people read less years before diagnosis. So "reading prevents Alzheimer's" overstates it. Staying mentally engaged is one sensible part of brain health, alongside exercise, sleep, social contact and treating blood pressure, and anyone worried about their memory should talk to a doctor.

5. Do book readers live longer?

A 2016 study by Avni Bavishi, Martin Slade and Becca Levy at the Yale School of Public Health looked at 3,635 adults aged 50 and over in a long-running US health survey. Over up to 12 years of follow-up, people who read books lived almost two years longer on average than people who read none. Those who read more than three and a half hours a week were 23 percent less likely to die during the study period, and those who read less were still 17 percent less likely, after adjusting for factors such as sex, race and education.

The benefit was linked to books specifically, not newspapers or magazines, which the authors connected to the deeper, more immersive engagement that books invite. Like all observational studies, it shows a link rather than proof, but it is a large sample and a striking result. The paper's title sums up the practical advice: a chapter a day.

6. Reading as a way to unwind

You may have seen the claim that six minutes of reading cuts stress by 68 percent, beating music, a cup of tea and a walk. It comes from a 2009 test by cognitive neuropsychologist David Lewis of the consultancy Mindlab International, reported in the British press. It was not published in a peer-reviewed journal, and the exact figures should be taken lightly.

The underlying idea is still reasonable. Absorbing yourself in a story moves attention away from your own worries, and many sleep specialists suggest a paper book, rather than a bright screen, as part of a calm bedtime routine. Reading is not a treatment for anxiety, but as a daily habit it is cheap, pleasant and low-risk.

Reading together, and why it helps

Reading also has a social side. Psychotherapists and bibliotherapists, such as Ella Berthoud of The School of Life in London, recommend shared reading for couples and families because a book gives people something new to talk about and a gentle way into personal subjects. Book clubs work on the same principle. There is little hard research on couples specifically, but the broader evidence on shared activities and conversation supports the idea that discussing a book can bring people closer.

For children, the case is stronger still: reading aloud with a parent builds vocabulary and attention, and pediatric groups encourage it from infancy.

How to get the benefits

  • Aim for regular, not heroic. In the Yale study, even modest weekly reading was linked to a benefit. Twenty or thirty minutes a day is plenty.
  • Choose books you genuinely enjoy. Immersion matters more than prestige. A gripping thriller kept the Emory students reading.
  • Mix fiction and non-fiction. Stories exercise imagination and perspective-taking; non-fiction feeds curiosity and learning.
  • Protect the time. Keep a book by the bed or in your bag, and put the phone in another room for the first chapter.
  • Talk about what you read. A friend, partner or book club turns reading into conversation and makes it easier to keep going.

Reading will not cure disease or turn you into a different person overnight. As a lifelong habit, though, it is one of the few pleasures that research keeps linking to a sharper, longer and calmer life.

Sources: ScienceDaily: A novel look at how stories may change the brain (Emory University, 2014); FORRT Replication Atlas: Kidd and Castano (2013) and its replications; Pacific Standard: Lifetime of reading slows cognitive decline (Wilson et al., Neurology, 2013); Alzforum: Friedland et al., PNAS 2001; Litro: Get reading for a longer life (Bavishi, Slade and Levy, 2016); list idea originally shared by I Heart Intelligence.

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