Why Reading Is Great for Your Brain

• Reading improves brain function and may even add years to your life.
• Reading fiction seems to have more brain benefits than reading nonfiction.
• Literary fiction, in particular, can enhance emotional intelligence, which could improve 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 used data from the long-running Health and Retirement Study at the University of Michigan to study this idea. In their study, 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 every other for an average of about 10 years.

The findings: People who were avid books 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 or overall health.

Reading engages the brain

The results weren’t too surprising, according to study author Avni Bavishi, now a medical student 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.”

It’s not the first time that research has shown that reading makes you brainier. In July 2013, research from the Rush University Medical Center in Chicago showed that mentally stimulating activities, including reading, can help preserve memory and thinking skills as people age.

But there may be something special about reading books as opposed to other reading materials. “Our findings were not nearly as robust when you looked at reading newspapers, magazines and periodicals,” Bavishi says.

Your English lit teacher was right

And research suggests that reading works of fiction, especially literary fiction, results in brain benefits that reading nonfiction and popular fiction do not. Although there can be overlap between literary and popular fiction, the study authors said that popular fiction typically has formulaic plots, whereas literary fiction has more character development and less focus on plot (Tom Clancy versus Flannery O’Connor, for example). The literary works include empathy and emotional intelligence — the ability to “read” and understand other people, which can be helpful in navigating social relationships.

David Comer Kidd, then a doctoral candidate at the New School for Social Research in New York City and now a senior researcher at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, sought to determine the effects of reading such fiction on what’s called theory of mind — the capacity to identify other people’s thoughts and feelings. Participants were assigned to read either literary fiction, such as short stories by Anton Chekhov, or more popular books, such as Danielle Steel's The Sins of the Mother and Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn. Tests on identifying emotions in others were higher among those who read more literary works, compared with those who read popular page-turners.

The University of Toronto also found that people who read fiction frequently were better able to empathize with others and put themselves in others’ shoes. And in studies using MRI brain scans, the researchers showed that brain areas concerned with understanding narrative stories overlapped with those involved with empathy.

Good literature enhances empathy

Kidd isn’t sure why literary fiction enhances this brain function more than other book genres, but he says, “It may prompt you to slow down and think about what other people are experiencing.” Often popular fiction has less nuanced characters, requiring less work from the reader in order to make inferences about their intentions. “If you’re reading The Hunt for Red October [a best-seller by Tom Clancy], you immediately know that Jack Ryan [the book’s protagonist] is the good guy,” he explains.