Neuroscience shows that how we read—not just what we read—may fundamentally alter our cognitive abilities.
Your brain on screens is not the same as your brain on books. Neuroscience now shows that when we swap pages for pixels, it’s not just a convenient change of format—we are altering how our brains process and retain information, with significant implications for readers of all ages.
Children with just one book at home are nearly twice as likely to meet literacy and numeracy standards as those without, regardless of income, education, or geography. Beyond developing basic literacy, physical books foster crucial parent-child interactions that build social-emotional and cognitive skills.
These early advantages compound over time. Children growing up with access to books complete an average of three additional years of education compared to those without—potentially the difference between a university education and a high school diploma.
Reading Is Reading. Or Is It?
If books build better brains, a question emerges in our increasingly digital world: Does how we read matter as much as what we read?
As home and school environments change through technology, the assumption that “reading is reading” now faces scientific scrutiny.
Findings from a paper published in the Social Psychology of Education show that while the number of print books in a home strongly predicts academic achievement, the number of e-books shows no similar correlation.
These results point to what researchers have termed the “screen inferiority effect.”
This effect was comprehensively demonstrated in a 2024 meta-analysis of 49 studies involving thousands of readers from elementary school through college. The findings show that individuals who read on screens reliably score lower on comprehension tests than their peers reading the same text in print.
Results highlight that the benefits of reading depend, at least in part, on the reading medium itself.
The Hypnotic Effect of Screens
Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, an associate professor at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and the Kennedy Krieger Institute at Johns Hopkins University, sought to uncover the neural reasons underlying the “screen inferiority effect.”
In one study, Horowitz-Kraus recruited 19 children ages 8 to 12 to undergo an MRI scan to assess connectivity in brain regions involved in language processing and cognition.
By Eric Kube
