How Reading Changes Your Brain, Unnaturally

Reading is not an innate human ability—not just in the sense “nobody is born knowing how to read”, but also biologically: the brain evolved for vision and speech, not for interpreting written symbols (which innovation so recent as to be a mere tick of the evolutionary clock), so it repurposes visual, auditory, language, attention, and affect circuits to create a neural network that can handle reading, where none existed in our infancy.

This has some interesting resultant quirks and consequences:

Reading and rewriting

Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics emerged around 5,000 years ago, shifting gradually into the letters and characters used today as societies read and wrote more.

How exactly we go about writing things makes a difference. For example logographic systems like Chinese rely heavily on visual memory and association regions; evidence includes a bilingual stroke patient who lost the ability to read Chinese but retained English, because of the different neural demands on different parts of the brain.

Generally speaking, reading activates all four cortical lobes, linking characters to sounds and meaning*; learning to read reshapes brain activity, structure, and connectivity.

^{*Not necessarily in that order. For example, Chinese would link it first to meaning and then to sound, whereas Korean is sound first and then meaning. But the overall result and big-picture neuronal activation is more or less the same.}

It goes deeper too; immersive reading (such as when reading a good novel, when one becomes “lost” in the book, and effectively hallucinates during the reading period) can activate the anterior insula, producing physical sensations such as nausea, pain, or discomfort that mirror a character’s experience, showing how reading engages bodily systems.

On a more abstract level, deep reading transforms brain circuits, shapes empathy, and ultimately influences society by changing minds, hearts, and the futures readers are capable of imagining.

You might be wondering about reading on screens vs on paper. While there’s no difference (neurally speaking) between reading a paper book or an e-ink device, reading on phones and tablets (which tend to have more distractions in even the simplest interfaces) encourages passive scrolling and skimming, increasing susceptibility to misinformation, and constant digital distraction can impair attention and executive function too.

For more on all of this, enjoy:

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Take care!