Challenges

- Reading books helps improve brain function and may even add years to your life.
- Reading fiction may offer more brain benefits than reading nonfiction.
- Literary fiction, in particular, may enhance feelings of empathy, a boon for your social life.
Want to improve your brain function? A library card may be your new best friend. Research suggests that reading books can make your brain work better and may even lengthen your life.
Researchers at the Yale School of Public Health tested this idea using data from the long-running Health and Retirement Study at the University of Michigan. More than 3,600 people ages 50 and older were surveyed about their reading and other habits and given baseline cognition tests. Researchers followed up with them regularly for up to 12 years. The findings: Avid book readers not only scored higher on tests of memory and mental status — tests measuring decline in mental abilities — but they lived longer, too. Reading books an average of 30 minutes a day lowered the risk of mortality by 20 percent. The findings held up regardless of the participants’ age, gender, race, education, income and overall health.
Reading improves vocabulary and memory
The results weren’t too surprising, according to study author Avni Bavishi Ughreja, M.D., now a cardiovascular disease fellow at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine. “Reading seems to engage the brain in various ways,” she says. “It improves vocabulary, imagination and critical thinking.”
Subsequent research shows that reading has other brain benefits. In a study involving 76 people ages 60 to 79 reported in 2022 in Frontiers in Psychology, participants assigned to leisure reading for 90 minutes a day, five times a week saw improvements in their verbal working memory and episodic memory, compared with a control group that did not read. What’s more, in a 2021 study of almost 2,000 people age 64 and older published in International Psychogeriatrics, frequent reading was linked to a reduced risk of cognitive decline over the 14-year study period, no matter the reader’s level of education.
More From Staying Sharp
Track Your Screen Time
Set digital limits
Let Go of Worries Before Bed
You can make sleep-disrupting thoughts disappear
Learn a New Instrument
Pick one that strikes a chord with you