How reading changes the way your brain works - BBC World Service

0:00 Clicking on this video activated circuits in your brain that took thousands of years to develop the ones required for reading. We think of language as natural and reading is written language, so it must be natural. But it isn't. It isn't natural at all. Scientific studies indicate that a neurotypical brain is born with the circuitry that allows our eyes to see and our vocal cords to produce sounds, but it doesn't innately have the ability to read.

0:31 From an evolutionary time scale, our brain hasn't had enough time to develop a dedicated reading brain. And so to build a reading brain network, we co-opt parts of the brain involved in vision and auditory processing, and language and attention and affect. The Sumerian cuneiform symbols are thought to be one of the earliest writing systems in the world, dating back to around 3300 BC. Around the same time, though, Egyptians started developing their hieroglyphics.

1:04 Symbols evolved over time. The more we read and wrote, the more sophisticated they became becoming the letters and characters we recognise today. Scientists now know that reading activates the brain so that letters and words become associated with sounds and meanings. Reading is really a whole brain process. It involves activation and all four lobes of the cortex. The process of developing a reading brain alters everything from brain activity to brain structure and brain connectivity.

1:43 And the language we read also shapes our brain. Chinese characters, for instance, are an example of the logographic system. Each object or idea is represented by a symbol rather than by a set of letters of the alphabet. Research indicates that learning logographic writing systems activates different areas of the brain than learning an alphabet-based language like English. The areas involved in visual memory and visual association do more of the work. This theory was corroborated after scientists studied a bilingual patient who knew both Chinese and English.

2:19 The man suffered a massive stroke, which affected some areas of his brain, including his ability to read Chinese, but astonishingly, his proficiency in English remained intact. It's a beautiful example of how the brain circuit reflects the requirements of Chinese, which inevitably means more visual memory and visual processing of those beautifully intricate symbols or characters.

2:52 Whatever the language, reading not only impacts the brain, but it also affects us on a physical level. We might feel in our guts the nervousness or the pain of a character. And I mean that not only like I feel it inside me, but I mean that literally. Like the anterior insula, which is responsible for gastromotoric movement for feelings of nausea and pain and discomfort is also the part of the brain that's associated with many of the empathic processes.

3:28 And the brain is very adaptable. Evidence suggests that it's already changing as a result of new technologies. Reading on a phone or tablet is generally passive scrolling, often interrupted by messages and alerts. When we read on screens, we tend to skim, and when we skim, we're more susceptible to misinformation. We need to support individuals in being able to think critically about the things that they're reading, because that's fundamental to a democracy is our ability to analyse and think deeply about the information that's that we're consuming.

4:04 Some academic research even suggests that children who use cell phones from an early age perform worse in school later in life. At eight years of age, the amount of digital exposure predicted their attentional executive function processing and academic performance. And it's a negative. The more digital, the worse academic. If you can imagine if that brain is constantly being distracted and hyper stimulated, you're going to have them not able to really move from one stimulus to the next without a desire for ever quicker intervals between stimuli.

4:49 So then you have kids going offline and saying they're bored. It's a relatively new field of research, and some studies suggest that monitored and education-focused screen time can be beneficial to children. For parents concerned about navigating the digital world, the advice is to go back to basics. The antidote to all that's happening is the simplest, most beautiful one, and that is to have our children immersed in reading and have a reading life. Our parents and teachers all have to help, you know, they have to model, they have to read to their child.

5:25 They have to love it themselves. And this is likely to have benefits beyond the individual reader. The power of deep reading is really fundamental to our humanity. When we read deeply, we change our brains and we change who we are. And that process of changing the minds and hearts of individuals changes society and allows us to build bigger, more beautiful futures.