We’re reading less. And it’s making us stupid

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 booktoc, 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-litter at age. But what do we lose when we stop reading? Today, the benefits of being a bookworm. From The Guardian, I'm Madeline Finley 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 is enthusiastic but quite slow. I can't manage 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 ceased to understand the world by the Chilean author Benjamin Labitu. I'm reading a book called Brian at the moment, which is fantastic. By Guy Club 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. 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 and 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 Flin Effect. So James Flin was a philosopher and a psychologist. And he found that in the 20th century there was this really steady and substantial rise in IQs. So if you looked at like 100 years, 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 a work? Well, obviously you could look at things like nutrition. Nutrition has changed a lot in 100 years. But, you know, chiefly education, right? 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 the core of literacy is learning to read. And so that is like a, 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? Take some time. So what does figuring out all these shapes do for us? So I put this question to a guy called Falk Hurtig. And he's an experimental psychologist and he's at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics and the Netherlands. He's done a lot of research into literacy and cognition. And he particularly works in India where there's actually a quite a high rate of literacy 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 we have to pay very close attention to these symbols. And in particular, there are mirror symbols. So, you know, a B and D, obviously, 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? So then the question comes, well, how are we doing it? What bits of our brain are we recruiting to do this job? Which isn't something that we've been evolved to do over hundreds of thousands of years? The answer that neuroscience has found is that we use networks in the brain that have been created that have evolved for a similar purpose, but slightly different purpose. And this is for example, face recognition or object recognition. So if you think about if you need to recognize faces, it's like recognizing some visual, complex thing and it has some similarity to, you know, recognizing visually the letters of the the English alphabet. For example, and interestingly, literal people are actually better in recognizing faces as well as other object categories. Okay. So once you've learned the alphabet, you begin to combine the letters to learn words and then those words, you know, become our expanded vocabulary. This all requires memory. So presumably literacy has some effect on our memories. Yeah. And folk thinks that memory is really where the main effect of reading lies. And if you think through, okay, well, why would that be? Let's take vocabulary. When you're reading a book, you're exposed to far more words than you're going to come across in a sort of, you know, your spontaneous conversation, certainly far more than the words I'm exposed to in my spontaneous conversations. And so you're obviously having to learn a lot more words. You're having to remember what they mean. And readers do know more words than the non-readers. And so that is going to be exercising your long term memory. But it's not just long term memory. I mean, if you think also there will be effects on short term memory because as you're reading, you need to hold in your mind, you know, what are the names? What are the stories of these people? What are the places? Who's done? What to whom? And folk said there's, you know, some evidence that readers are a little bit more resilient against particular neurological disorders, like conditions like dementia, one of the theories behind that is that readers will have this sort of greater what's called cognitive reserve is how folk puts it. People believe it's a bit like a spider web that is very tightly knit. And the more you read, the more words you can add to this spider web, the more tightly knit it is. And if, for whatever reasons, maybe a stroke or illness, this network is damaged, despite a web, people who read a lot because of this more tightly knit net have more capacity or have more paths to compensate and that there might delay some of the consequences of cognitive decline a bit. And it's interesting there that you mention unfolding stories because in our jobs, we read and you write a lot of stories and in that you have to follow or construct a logical argument. This, then that, then that, then that, that must play a role. Yeah. And folks says that this really does seem to help with our sort of our logical thinking as to how one thing will go to another. And so all of those things are exercising your brain to understand building a logical argument and building a coherent argument. And one of the most joyous things about reading is its ability to transport you to new worlds, to take you to different times, different places, also to allow you to see your own world from a totally new perspective. And I do think reading just really opens the mind. Yeah. And folks talks about this in his book. He explores sort of the abstract thinking that might be abstract worlds with all sorts of different ideas that we're not used to and all the rest of it. One of the things I thought was interesting about he was talking about when you look at sort of literature versus illiterate people is that the illiterate people tend to be sort of, it's almost like they're living more in the here and now and that they're often connecting things very much to sort of concrete things in the sort of real, often visual environment. And you know, he's done work on this himself and he was talking about say if you draw a circle, an illiterate person might say, oh, that's a plate or all that's the moon. And say if you asked people to point out what the similarities are between say a fish and a bird, illiterate person might say, well, you know, they're both animals because we used to sort of abstract labels. We used to categorizing, but illiterate person might say, well, you know, fish lives in water and if a bird was thirsty, it might might want some water so that is the connection there. And so there is this sense that without the sort of literacy, you're constantly bringing things back to the world in front of you, which actually sounds really valuable, but I think you're not doing so much of this ability where you can have these more abstract thoughts. Coming up, are we entering a post literate age? I'm Jimmy Femmehrewa, Food Journalist, Restaurant Critic and Culinary Obsessive. I've spent the past few months traveling around the UK, trying the latest and tastiest food trends. All of them, supercharged by social media. And now I'm going to share them with you. I've met ramen fanatics and culturests through a cardiff, dug into morish platters of Irish-Chinese spice bags, in Birmingham and Belfast, and gorge on banana and tahini brule buns and oven warm scones in London and Stockholm. This was all in service of my new Guardian YouTube show. It's called Feed with Me, Jimmy Femmehrewawa. Watch it on the Guardian and YouTube, links in the show. Warning, do not watch when I'm going. And despite all the evidence that you've just described about the very many benefits of reading, I've read a lot of reports about the fact that we're doing it less. We're picking up fewer and fewer books. And it's part of the reason we're having this conversation. I mean, are we putting down books for good? There's certainly some evidence out there that people are reading less, but it's a little bit mixed, right? I mean, in 2025 there was a U-gov poll. And it was quite staggering. It was a U-gov poll of Britain's. And it found that 40% of Britain's had not read a single book in the past 12 months. A month or so ago, there was a US survey out which said that a third of those people who took part were reading less than they were a decade ago. There's some other data pointing in the other direction. I mean, another survey of kids in the UK found that about one in five kids in their spare time would turn to reading. And that's actually up on last year. So I don't think it's all lost. I think what is interesting is to keep an eye on this. And see what's going to happen with all the digital devices that we're now using. And if that's going to lead to more sort of fragmented attention spans, people just not having the time for reading. But also, you know, it leads to this suspicion. People have talked about, are we entering a post literate world where we are so obsessed and feel so much of our time watching like little clips on social media, you know, listen to podcasts watching short videos and fog takes this point seriously. And a lot of his concern is around how passive that is. Obviously, if you're reading a book, you're being handed the words, but your brain is building the world, whereas it's not the same whether you're just handed a movie or something like that. And he was also concerned about, you know, our interactions with AI and, you know, chatbots with them being passive as well. The flin effect in the most advanced Western countries or the countries with the best education systems. So that's mostly Scandinavian countries or countries like the Netherlands. There the flin effect actually started to decline first and quite a long time ago. So maybe something like 20 to 30 years ago. And that already reflected some, some declining reading habits followed by some declining literacy, you know, achievements. And that all happened even before the invention of generative AI and large language models, the chat chippity, etc. that now everybody is using. So given that, it's probably very likely that literacy levels and, you know, cognitive abilities are going to decline, yeah, probably massively. I mean, I am so guilty of that Ian. But very often I'm like, I'm going to read my book and then I get my phone out and I just find half an hour's past. I've been looking at videos and, yeah, it is pretty bad. And I'm not doing less reading because I'm reading a lot of emails every day. But I guess it's what we're reading. And, you know, I used to be a really, really big reader as a kid and as a teenager. But is it a use it or lose it situation? If I don't start reading again, am I going to lose it? It does seem that if you're not using your brain in this way and the way that reading exercises it, those faculties are going to sort of, they're going to wane a bit. And you will, you know, have sort of less sharp cognition as a result of it. I mean, thought was telling me about these tests called PISA tests. Now, PISA tests are given to school children 15 years old around the world. They're chosen at random and they sit these tests and they measure expertise in maths, science and reading. And in recent years, the reading scores in developed countries have been going down. Falk has this concern that if this is where it's going, that we're just going to end up with these sort of weaker critical thinking skills, these weaker critical literacy as well where we're sort of going to pick apart where there's power in writing and who's trying to achieve what from what's being written. So, you know, this can apply to nonfiction like the documents who's trying to steer me to do this and that. And those skills are more important than we might realise. They're really more important than ever before because we're kind of navigating this online landscape where we're having to kind of pick apart information really quickly and understand it. So, having those skills feels very important today. Totally. I mean, you want now to be able to tell whether you're being told the truth or not or whether what you're being told is at least sensible or not. After everything that you've explained, I definitely feel persuaded that I should put more effort into picking up that book at night before I go to bed and I'm sure our listeners will feel that way as well. But if anyone isn't persuaded yet, maybe you could give your elevator pitch for books. And maybe I'd love to hear as well about a book that's kind of changed something for you that's given you something. Okay. Well, I mean, most people will have had that experience where they're reading a book and they don't want it to end. And you're so immersed in the world that you don't want to be ejected back into the real world. And that immersion is when all this really interesting cognitive stuff is happening, right? You're immersed in the story, you're immersed in the characters, you're following everything that's happening and it's really enriching your thinking. A book that works for one person won't work for someone else. But I would say you can never be unhappy reading Lucky Jim. Kingsley Amos book from 1950s, very old book. But genuinely funny. And what's wrong with that? It shouldn't make it a lesser book. It's just utterly enjoyable. You know, I was talking to Falk about it as well, you know, what are you reading? And he said, look, what's really important on this is to just enjoy whatever it is. Because if you enjoy the book, it's going to reinforce this habit of going back and reading another book. And when we chat, he was saying, you know, he was getting quite into Murakami and you could tell that he was just really enjoying being whisked away to that other place. And that's what it's all about, right? If he stopped realizing actually what we are doing, that these are the best times. So there, there's also quite a bit of research on the psychology of enjoyment, of happiness. And reading is one of the way it was things that can actually be very good to achieve that because it takes us into another world. And then we we we stop thinking about what we are doing. We are we are switching off, you know, forget all our worries and our daily lives. And we get at the same time all these benefits without realizing. I think this is actually some kind of magic. Thanks to Ian and Falkutik. Falk's book is the perks of being a bookworm. And just to let you know, Science Weekly can now be found on YouTube. So if you fancy seeing us as well as hearing us, head to YouTube and search Guardian Science Weekly. And that's it for today. This episode was produced by me Madeline Finley. It was sound designed by Joel Cox and the executive producer is Ellie Bury. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then. This is the Guardian.