So, there’s a new study out (pdf) that’s used brain scanning to investigate how reading a book changes your brain. It tripped my skeptic’s radar right away because our brains are changing all the time, and pretty much anything we do influences those changes. And we already knew the power of reading novels, didn’t we?
You follow a story, meet characters, learn things. Nonetheless the media are all over this neuroscience study, hyping and misinterpreting the results. Among the most daft was “Reading a good book may make permanent changes to your brain” from the UPI news agency. That’s quite a leap given that the study only looked at brain changes up to five days after participants had finished reading a novel. But let’s hold off on debunking the headlines for now and take a look at what the researchers actually did.
They used a technique known as “resting state fMRI”, which involves scanning a person’s brain while they lie in the scanner doing nothing. Nineteen volunteers (12 women) visited a lab at Emory University to have their brains scanned in this way daily for 19 days. The first five visits, the participants just turned up for the scan.
The middle nine days they spent each evening before a scan reading a chapter from Pompeii: A Novel by Robert Harris (he must be loving this free publicity!). Each morning before their scan the participants completed a quiz about the book’s content (e.g. “What is Marcus Attilius Primus’s job?”), and answered questions about how the book made them feel. The final five days the volunteers had daily scans again without any quizzes or reading – this was to look for lingering effects from the days spent reading the book.
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