What Reading Does To Your Brain

 Progressives and their digital invention# are taking away this ability to read from a book. Newspapwers are practically non existent, with almost all matter on the internet. Reading from the internet is not cozy, esp. with its blue light hurting your eyes. I love reading from a Sefer. And our Bnei Yeshiva are reading from the best sources! Sorry, necessary to go to UT to enjoy this video.

 

 Reading feels effortless, but it's one of the most unnatural things the human brain has ever learned to do. In this video, I explore how the brain learned to read, how it turns symbols on a page into meaning, and why reading reshapes attention, memory, and empathy. 

From the half-second behind every sentence to the way books simulate experience in the mind, this is a look inside the reading brain, and why deep reading still matters in a world built for distraction. 

 Sources and further reading: Bal, P.M. & Veltkamp, M. (2013). “How Does Fiction Reading Influence Empathy? An Experimental Investigation on the Role of Emotional Transportation.” Dehaene, S., Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read (Penguin, 2009). Dehaene, S. “Inside the Letterbox: How Literacy Transforms the Human Brain.” Mar, A.R., Oatley, K.& Peterson, J.(2009). “Exploring the link between reading fiction and empathy: Ruling out individual differences and examining outcomes.” Communications, 34(4), 407–428. Pulvermüller, F. (2005). “Brain mechanisms linking language and action.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 6, 576–582. Verghese, J. et al. (2003). “Leisure Activities and the Risk of Dementia in the Elderly.” New England Journal of Medicine, 348(25), 2508–2516. Wolf, M. Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (Harper, 2018). Wolf, M. “Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound.” The Guardian, 2018.

Comments to the above video:

In late January this year (2025) I had a “mini-stroke” that I recognized as having affected precisely the “visual word-form area.” Letters were fragmented, not just from each other, but into bits and pieces, like an over-stirred alphabet soup. I’m an editor by profession, so, at least initially, this would have been a huge blow. For some reason, my response was, “Okay; this is an interesting challenge. Let’s fix it.” In hospital, the nurses would relentlessly challenge me to read words in various font sizes, even when waking me at 2 am for some other reason. This encouraged me to read even more, and I got back to editing right away. Eleven months later, I read more slowly—but also more carefully. I find that I’m far more sensitive to what an author wants to say, and more inspired to edit “empathetically”: not try to change a point of view, but to try to see it more clearly, which has always been at the root of my craft. It’s all about attention.

“ Reading expands the architecture that thinking depends on”……What an amazing sentence!!

This was an extraordinarily interesting podcast. I have read avidly all my life, I’m now 75, and it’s never given me a feeling of superiority but a deep awareness that people who don’t read lose out on so many “life experiences”. I occasionally pick up a very challenging read that slows me down and makes me reach for a dictionary, and I find it recharges me. This podcast has filled in so many questions I’ve had about reading. Thank you very much indeed.

I am a retired reading specialist and have worked with thousands of humans in learning how to read. On thing I noticed is that young people with "learning disabilities" continue to improve their reading skills well into adulthood. . My middle school students self selected books to read so when they finished one book they started another and I documented their reading this way 200 minutes a week. These minutes expanded and they got "extra credit" for reading more and almost all students reported that they were reading twenty minutes at home each evening, but they looked at the clock and realized they had just read an hour. They are amazed. Most common comment: this is the first time I actually read a book. My students had the highest state test scores with 80% of the eighth graders reading well into the high school level by the end of the year. I gave them a before and after test (Gates McGinity because it had a vocabulary subtest) and they were so proud of themselves. I told parents a good reward was to take them to the local big city, thirty miles away, and go to a bookstore. They got extra credit for going to the library. Students thought this was an easy class: all you had to do is read.

I hardly ever like movies from books. They destroy the imagination. It's a miracle to read a story and create the images in my head by myself

The comments are very interesting, read more of them.