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

0:00This is The Guardian.

0:13It'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 book talk, 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 madeline finley and this is science weekly

1:02ian 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

1:18Madeleine Finlay: relationship with reading um i mean i suppose one way of putting it is enthusiastic but quite slow i'm 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 i last one i finished recently was when we ceased to understand the world by the chilean author benjamin lapatute 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.

1:58Madeleine Finlay: 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 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.

2:41Madeleine Finlay: 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, 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. 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?

3:20Madeleine Finlay: Well, the core, I guess, of education is literacy. And at the core of literacy is learning to read. And so that is 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 Volk Hertig, and he's an experimental psychologist, and he's at the Max Planck Institute of Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands.

4:10Madeleine Finlay: 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 you know quite a lot of um things we have to pay very close attention to these symbols and in particular there are there are mirror symbols so you know a 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 so then the question becomes 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 you know been evolved you know 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.

5:18And 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 English alphabet, for example. And interestingly, literate people are actually better in recognising faces as well as other object categories.

5:58Okay, 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. vocabulary. This all requires memory. So presumably literacy has some effect on our memories.

6:16Madeleine Finlay: 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 non-readers. And so that is going to be exercising your long-term memory.

6:50Madeleine Finlay: 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 Fogg said there's some evidence that readers are a little bit more resilient against particular neurological disorders, 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 Fogg puts it. People believe it's a bit like a spider web that is very tightly knit.

7:29And 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, the spider 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. Ian, 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.

8:19That must play a role.

8:21Madeleine Finlay: Yeah. And Falk says that this really does seem to help with 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 Falk talks about this in his book. He explores sort of the abstract thinking.

9:01Madeleine Finlay: That might be abstract worlds with all sorts of different ideas that we're not used to and all the rest of it. But one of the things I thought was interesting about he was talking about when you look at sort of literate 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 that's the moon.

9:41Madeleine Finlay: And say, if you asked people to point out what the similarities are between, say, a fish and a bird, a illiterate person might say, well, you know, they're both animals. because we're used to sort of abstract labels. We're used to categorising. But a literate person might say, well, you know, a fish lives in water and if a bird was thirsty, it 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.

10:27Coming up, are we entering a post-literate age?

10:39Madeleine Finlay: I'm Jimmy Famarewa, food journalist, restaurant critic and culinary obsessive. I've spent the past few months travelling around the UK trying the latest and tastiest food trends, all of them supercharged by social media. and now I'm gonna share them with you. I've met ramen fanatics in Colchester and Cardiff, dug into Moorish platters of Irish Chinese spice bags in Birmingham and Belfast, and gorged on banana and tahini brulee buns and oven warm scones in London and Stockport. This was all in service of my new Guardian YouTube show. It's called Feed with me, Jimmy Famarewa. Watch it on The Guardian and YouTube, links in the show notes.

11:15Madeleine Finlay: Warning, do not watch when hungry.

11:22Ian, 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?

11:42Madeleine Finlay: 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 YouGov poll, and it was quite staggering. It was a YouGov poll of Britons, and it found that 40 % of Britons 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.

12:23Madeleine Finlay: 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 or listening to podcasts, watching short videos. And Fogg takes this point seriously, and a lot of his concern is around how passive that is.

13:10Madeleine Finlay: 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 if you're just handed a movie or something like that. And he was also concerned about our interactions with AI and chatbots, with them being passive as well. The Flynn 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 Flynn 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 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 that very often I'm like I'm gonna read my book and then I get my phone out and I just find half an hour has passed.

14:45I'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?

15:09Madeleine Finlay: 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 sharper cognition as a result of it. I mean, Falk 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 math, science and reading. And in recent years, the reading scores in developed countries have been going down. folk has this concern that if this is the way 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 sort of can pick apart where there's power in in writing and who's trying to achieve what from what's being written so that you know this can apply to non-fiction like the documents who's trying to steer me to do this and that and those skills are more important than we might realize Mm.

16:13They'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.

16:28Madeleine Finlay: 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.

17:11Madeleine Finlay: 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.

17:49Madeleine Finlay: You know, I was talking to Folk 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 chatted, 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 the other place. And that's what it's all about, right? If we stop realizing actually what we are doing, that these are the best times. So there's also quite a bit of research on the psychology of enjoyment, of happiness.

18:33and reading is one of the most things that can actually be very good to achieve that because it takes us into another world and then we stop thinking about what we are doing, we are switching off, forget all our worries in our daily lives and we get at the same time all these benefits without realizing. I think this is actually some kind of magic.

19:11Thanks to Ian and to Folk Utig. Folk'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 Finlay. It was sound designed by Joel Cox. And the executive producer is Ellie Bury. We'll be back on Thursday. See you then.

19:50Madeleine Finlay: This is The Guardian.