What Does Reading on Screens Do to Our Brains?

There's nothing less natural than reading . Reading is an acquired set of skills that literally transforms the brain. Everyone should be reading books. Books are life experience, books are knowledge. Books are a community. Without books, we wouldn't be human in the way that we are. Literacy is one of the greatest inventions of the human species. First fire, then reading.

Reading is the blink of the eye in our revolutionary clock. It's only six thousand years old, and it began in such a simple way to mark how many wine vessels or sheep we had. And with the birth of alphabetic systems, we began to have an efficient means of remembering, and storing knowledge. What reading does is exploit a principle of design in the human brain, that allows it to make new connections between visual regions, language regions, regions for thought and emotions. It begins actually afresh in every new reader. It doesn't exist inside our head. Each person who has to learn to read, has to create a brand new circuit in their brain.

What's more, reading books isn't just practical.

Reading a great story is so much more than entertainment. Reading actually has many therapeutic benefits. Bibliography is the art of prescribing fiction to cure life's ailments. Claustrophobia, rage, exhaustion, and the cure is Zorba The Greek.

Reading brings three magical powers- creativity, intelligence and empathy. Reading for the joy of it is one of the two key factors in a kid's later economic success. You're more likely to not be in prison, to vote, to own your own home. All of these advantages and benefits happen as a result of literacy. Your brain goes into a meditative state. A physical process which slows your heartbeat and calms you down, and reduces anxiety.

Many of the bookish benefits depend on a state known as "deep reading" .

When we read at a surface level, we're just getting the information. When we read deeply, we're using much more of our cerebral cortex. Deep reading means that we make analogies, we make inferences, which allows us to be truly critical, analytical, empathic human beings.

We're now reading more words than ever before - an average of around 100,000 a day. Most of these words, however, are read in short bursts on screens.

We think of the book as the work, but the book is just a delivery mechanism. The novel is evolving. There's all sorts of amazing things which are being written deliberately to be read on phones. These kinds of new mediums, they are giving a voice to a new generation of writers, who don't have to kind of get through a bottleneck. It stops us from having this kind of conditioning as to what is 'good writing' and it actually allows people just to talk and share stories and to share experiences. It doesn't matter the medium, it doesn't matter how you get it, it's a story.

And the books, maybe, provide this illusion that this is it. It's never been it, it's a way into a thought process.

But digital reading may come at a cost for the reading brain.

We brought together scholars and scientists from over 30 countries to do research about the impact of digitization on reading. We found that there is, what they call, a screen inferiority. There is a lot that can be equally well read on your smartphone, shorter news updates, but with something that is cognitively or emotionally challenging. Reading on a screen leads to poorer reading comprehension than reading on paper. The reality is, it's not what or how much we read but how we read, that's really important. The volume is having negative effects because to absorb that much, there's a propensity towards skimming. The reading brain gas a plastic circuitry. The circuit will reflect the characteristics of the medium with which it reads. The characteristics of the digital are going to be reflected in the circuit. If we don't train those capacities, we may eventually lose the ability to understand more complex content, and also perhaps to engage and to imagine.

What, then, might the future hold for books, for the reading brain?

The human imagination is a fantastic thing - we are very flexible. We find ways of doing what we want with the technology we've got. I think we'll see a lot more short story connections, and I think we'll see a lot more shorter books. Children's attention span has gotten shorter.

The chapters of the books should be short and visual.

Just as people can be bilingual and trilingual, we will be developing a bi literate brain. We can discipline ourselves to choose the medium that is best suited for what we're reading so that we don't lose the extraordinary gift that reading has given our species.

So, what would happen if we stopped reading books? We'd die. We'd be so bored.