How books shape minds and societies, building cognitive resilience and civic mindedness

How books shape minds and societies, building cognitive resilience and civic mindedness

This Thursday, the latest Nobel Prize for literature will be awarded a prestigious honor and one that brings authors to a wider audience. But surveys suggest that less and less of us are currently reading. Despite increasing studies loading the benefits of books for our brains, described as a mental workout that actually forges new neural pathways and generates new brain cells, reading reshapes the structures of our brain with a host of cognitive benefits from better memory, concentration to lowering depression and improving emotional intelligence. Avid readers are said to be less at risk for dementia or Alzheimer’s because they’ve built up what’s called a cognitive reserve. Well, to get more insight on it all, we’re joined by professor of child psychology and cognitive neuroscience at University Paris and director of LA Gregor Bros. Thanks so much for coming into studio and talking to us. Tell me more first of all, I mean how beneficial is a book for my brain then? Well, basically the book for your brain is really good because like it will like creates new pathway basically of information processing in your brain and depending of the type of book you’re reading it will have different types of effects. So fiction typically will have an effect on your ability to understand mental states of other people and that’s absolutely critical to create good social interactions with others. So it’s interesting because it’s very individual activity reading but has actually benefits for interindividual interactions. So that’s one way to understand like the benefits of uh reading basically. And if we don’t like fiction and we read fact non-fiction books well that that will actually have other type of effects. uh you will probably understand that it will uh have an effects on the type of knowledge you can access to and probably also have effects on uh critical thinking. So the more I read, the more knowledge that I have, the more able I am to question basically uh the facts or what I’m uh exposed to in real life. Okay. So either whichever we like there’s benefits and maybe a bit of both like nearly everything in life is a is the best solution. But so when we put ourselves in the minds of characters, I’ve understood that this makes our brains work in ways that other activities don’t because we’re trying to see ahead in the book. We’re trying to explain a bit more exactly what goes on in our one thing that will happen when you read and you can actually experience that you you will start to form what we call mental images. So you create mental images of the situations but also of the interactions between the different characters. And what we need to do in real life if we want to be to uh be more close to other people one thing I mean emotionally close one thing we need to learn basically is to take the perspective of others and that’s typically what you do in a book. So like someone will help you do that but explain what the other characters uh think, what they might what their intentions are, what they feel and all of that helps us then in real life to basically uh develop those type of uh abilities. And when you read headlines saying that you know a book can even fend off your risk for dementia. I mean how how true is that? And if so I mean how would it how does it impact it? Well I I think we need to be also a bit careful. any kind of cognitive ability, cognitive uh uh activities will have an impact, a positive impact and will uh be like diminish the risk factors of dementia. Just like the the I think what should be the information we give to the public is just that the more cognitively engaged you are in your life, the better it is for the development and for the aging of your brain. So it’s true for book uh because book have this uh very uh uh specific uh ways of engaging a lot of different types of uh resources. One thing we didn’t talk is like your working memory. So you have like this memory in your brain that allows you to manipulate and maintain information for a few minutes. And this is super important if you want to understand what you’re reading basically because you need to basically assate the information that you see at the beginning of the page with the one at the end of the page. So doing that consistently over 700 pages of course will create basically an environment to develop those type of skills that we know are very predictive of your professional development, school achievement but also your long life educational attainment. So how regularly do we have to read to get these kind of benefits? I mean is one book already going to help us? Well, it’s it’s better than not basically. Uh I will say and depends where you are and what at what stage you are of learning to read. If you’re a young kid, you need to read a lot because like the first sta stages of learning to read imply that you have to self-train yourself. And so you need to read a lot to be like able as adults or expert readers to be able to read without any effort or at least you feel that you don’t make an effort when you’re reading. So I I will say that it depends of where you are like basically if you’re kid or older adults but like the more you engage in the reading process the better it is basically and given your expertise in child psychology and that side of the brain I mean kids when they’re little they love to read the same book over and over and over which I’ve been told is reassuring to them it’s actually a positive thing they need us to keep reading but also little kids before they read they’re listening is listening to a book the same thing as reading it well it’s not exactly the same thing, but it’s critical because like what will basically predict the fact that you will become a great reader or an expert reader is the number of words that you have in your vocabulary. And the more you’re exposed to oral language, the better you’re going to be basically at reading. So everything is interlin basically because in the brain reading is what uh it’s basically taking visual information and associate those visual information with language information. So the more and the better you are at language, the better you going to become a good reader. Is there any difference to the format that we read in you know if it’s on screen or in print? Well, there are actually and we thought for a long time that it was just like a matter of like being more accustomed basically to reading on screens and this is apparently not the case. So we are a little bit uh not as efficient when we read on a screen just because we lack basically uh the spatial information of a book. So a book is basically an object and when you read you move your attention through this object and knowing whether you are in the beginning of the book or in the uh uh last part of the book that will creates basically information for you to better memorize the information. Oh, that’s fascinating because I was going to say the pages of a book are often just as visually similar from one page to the next as as your Kindle page, but they’re not exactly similar. Basically, if you look at the paragraph, the way they are structured, the number of the page numbering will give you some information of where you are in the book and that actually helps the memorization of the information in that book. Okay, that’s fascinating. So, even one book is better than no book for but for people who are daunted maybe about starting reading because it does take time out of your day. I’ve read that as little as 10 minutes a day is very useful. Yeah. I mean like any kind of as we said like any kind of cognitively engaging activity will be good for your brain health let’s say. So 10 minutes a day and also understanding that we spend our time reading. So we don’t necessarily realize that but when we text basically we read uh when we are in the street we read some signs and stuff like that. So, it’s not exactly the same activity as reading a book, but I’m just saying that we need also to be a bit careful. Like, we spend our days basically reading uh uh over and over again. But like if we can save those 10 minutes where it’s a little bit more demanding reading process that that helps us on the long run basically. Okay. Grego burst uh professor of child psychology and cognitive neuroscience. Thanks so much for coming into studio and bringing us your insight on it all. Fascinating. Thanks.

Celebrated Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai has just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature which casts a spotlight on the power of books, even as surveys show that fewer people are reading. Yet neuroscience is clear: reading is a mental workout that strengthens the brain. “It forges new neural pathways, generates new brain cells, and builds cognitive reserve,” says Grégoire Borst, Full Professor of Developmental Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience of Education at Université Paris Descartes. Fiction hones empathy and theory of mind, while nonfiction builds critical thinking and analytical depth. Reading activates working memory, sustained attention, and perspective-taking, skills vital for a flourishing democracy and social cohesion. Studies even link regular reading to reduced risks of depression, dementia, and Alzheimer’s. Mr. Borst emphasizes that “reading on paper even leads to better memory retention than screens”.  He highly recommends reading to be integrated across all stages of education. 
#Science #Books #CriticalThinking

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