Trying to read more? Your brain will thank you

The current state of literacy

0:00ABC Listen. Podcasts, radio, news, music and more.

0:07Voting is open for ABC Radio National's Top 100 Australian Books Countdown. Go to abc.net.au slash top100books and pick up to 10 of your favourites. Choose from the inspiration list or add your own title. Then in October we will tally everyone's votes and count down from 100 to number one on ABC Radio National and ABC Listen. You don't have long. Vote now at abc.net.au slash top100books.

0:38You can use a book for so much. You can relieve someone's anxiety. You can take someone out of their daily grind. You can make their life a little bit more joyful. Reading can be such a beautiful experience.

0:55Reading is no doubt powerful. It's also necessary. Road signs, emails, texts, all manner of boring paperwork. Reading is involved in pretty much every aspect of our lives. So how does reading work? How does our brain go from seeing shapes on a page to then turning them into words, which then make us feel things? There's quite a bit of evidence that reading helps us to better understand other people. And I think we know that hope is a really powerful psychological tool.

1:26And despite the necessity of reading in modern life, how is it that almost half of Australian adults are functionally illiterate? 44% according to one survey, which is astounding. I'm Sana Kadar, and this is All in the Mind from ABC Radio National. Today, books and the brain and the unique benefits of reading fiction over nonfiction. And All in the Mind producer, Rose Kerr, is in the studio with me today. Hey, Rose. Hi, Sana. So, Rose, you've mentioned before that you're like a major fiction reader.

2:00Is that what inspired this episode for you? Yeah, look, I'm always trying to find an excuse to spend more money on books. But to be honest, what actually inspired the episode was noticing in my day-to-day life, all of a sudden, reading has become really cool. Like, I know lots of people in their 20s and 30s who are making their own little book clubs. They are following book talk influencers, like people who just talk about books. And they're even renewing their library cards. That's interesting, because, like, I didn't know very much about book talk until

2:32books from book talk started being turned into film and TV. So, the first one was that Blake Lively film, the name I'm forgetting. You know the one, Justin Baldoni, etc. And then also the shows recently of, like, Off Campus and Heated Rivalry. So, yes, there's a lot of people very actively engaged in reading and talking about it online. But all of that's coming at the same time. Literacy rates have been falling. They've not been great for a while. Yeah, so that statistic you mentioned earlier, that 44% of Australian adults are functionally

3:03illiterate, that comes from a 2013 survey from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is from over a decade ago. So, things may have shifted since then. But it's like one of those statistics people tend to talk about when they look at this topic. It's also estimated that for Indigenous Australian adults, the rate of illiteracy is between 40 and 70%, and that comes from the Literacy for Life Foundation. And then in terms of 2026 data, we can look at NAPLAN results.

3:36So, if you've not heard of these before, these are Australia's national standardised school tests. And the results from this year showed that one in three students are falling below basic proficiency levels for reading and writing. And we should clarify, what does functional literacy actually mean? Yeah, good idea. So, functional literacy recognises that someone is able to read and write at a level where they can participate in society. You know, they can go to work, they can do the things that they need to do. So, if you're functionally illiterate, your skills basically fall below that threshold.

4:10And often when we talk about functional literacy these days, it also refers to digital literacy skills as well. Right. And so, do we have any idea why literacy rates are in so much trouble right now? There seems to be a few reasons. As you say, there are multiple interacting, contributing factors to this. This is Professor Genevieve MacArthur. She works at the Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy. And I'm also the Director of Research Translation at the Dyslexia Spelled Foundation.

4:42Genevieve suspects some of the reasons behind these literacy rates include the way we teach reading to the accessibility of that education. Particularly in a country like Australia, which is really big. Plus, students may not always connect with what they're being asked to read. If you're in a remote region of Australia, you might not really care too much about a story about a kid who got lost in a supermarket in the city, you know. So, you want to get the context right as well to engage the students in the reading and to see the point of learning to read.

5:13And in her own life, Genevieve has noticed changes in attitudes towards reading. Growing up in the 70s, you know, there'd be evenings where we would have our pyjamas on. We would have had dinner and my dad would say, right, we're going to the library. Like, okay, dad.

How the brain processes reading

5:30So, Sana, I think it's safe to say that reading is important. Yeah. But it's also really good for us. Like, if you want to look at it in a selfish way, it does have some awesome benefits. But before we can get into all of those, we need to understand how reading works. Are you ready for some neuroscience? Always. All right. So, we're going to learn basically, in a very broad way, how reading works in the brain. The first thing our brains notice is what the word looks like.

6:01So, the orthographic information of the word. So, like, the letters themselves? Yeah. So, if you're reading English, it'll be letters. But other languages, you might better describe it as characters. Right, right. Then, our brains attach the shape of the word to what it sounds like, which is called the phonological information. So, like, an O is O kind of thing. Yeah, exactly, exactly. And then, we combine those two parts with the meaning of the word. So, our brain's, like, sticking them together like a puzzle. Okay, so it's what the word looks like, plus what the word sounds like, plus the meaning.

6:35Absolutely. That's the equation. Yeah, exactly. And that is called lexical processing. Right, okay. And it's just a matter of, like, doing this over and over so you get sentences? Or how does it work for, you know, longer chunks of reading? Yeah, it's pretty much just that. But it does involve quite a lot of brain coordination to get your eyes and attention moving from word to word. Like, it is complicated. And at the same time, we've got multiple cognitive systems all working together. So, our language and visual processing systems and our memory.

7:06Okay, right. So, that's, like, a lot going on. Is this the same process whatever language you're talking about? Yes and no. Okay. So, to answer that question, you first have to recognize that reading is an invented skill. If you think about the writing really only invented from, like, 5,000 years ago. This is Dr. Lily Yu. She's a senior lecturer in the School of Psychological Sciences at Macquarie University. Her research aims to understand how people read and how different writing systems impact that process.

7:39So, what that actually means is that when we read, the process of reading essentially relies on the cognitive components or the process that humans have already developed for other tasks. Stuff like our attention and memory systems. So, regardless of the language we're reading, we broadly rely on those same cognitive processes. But there are some differences. The best example that I can give is comparing Chinese with English.

8:11If you encounter any sort of a Chinese text, you are probably aware that, you know, each of those Chinese characters, the box-shaped square like script, each of those Chinese characters is actually visually very dense. So, those kind of very dense visual complexity actually has a role in Chinese reading that's not typically observed in English or other alphabetic language reading. Lily and her team observed how this impacts reading through an eye-tracking study, where participants were asked to read text in their first language.

8:45So, we have native Chinese speaker reading the native Chinese text, English speaker reading English text, and a Finnish speaker for the Finnish text. And obviously, across three different kinds of tests, the semantic information or the content are equivalent across all three of those different tests. They found that overall comprehension of the text was more or less the same. However... The way they actually process that text information is very different.

9:15So, the finding associated with that particular study is that with Chinese, because of that very high level of the visual density at the front end. So, the pattern of the eyes actually appear to be like people spent longer time reading each word, but make fewer fixations overall on the sentences. So, depending on the language you're reading, your brain might be doing slightly different work to understand the text. But overall, because reading is an invented skill, it's going to use those same cognitive processes.

Cognitive benefits of books

9:56Now we know how reading works, we can get into its benefits. With all these cognitive processes going on, it's no big surprise that reading is good for the brain. For example, it can increase your vocabulary. That's not even only reading per se. So, even if you're only able to listen to audio books or like podcasts like this, the way that we organise the words in our head becomes more sophisticated, that we kind of know more of the nuances between different words.

10:29It can also improve our memory. That kind of wider or stronger networking of the semantic knowledge. It actually helped with our memory, both the working memory, but also the long-term memory. It's also thought that reading can be an escape or a way to relax. There's also a bunch of good stuff we can get from reading fiction specifically. We know that reading in general was going to be a boon to our vocabulary and our language abilities.

10:59But it's fiction that actually has a unique benefit. So, fiction is a much stronger predictor of verbal abilities than non-fiction. This is Raymond Ma, a professor of psychology from York University in Toronto. You know, so this is an area that I think there's insufficient amounts of research. I really wish more people were looking at this specific topic. But this research that is out there is very consistent in finding this effect, that, you know, fiction has this unique benefit. And we know that language abilities are a great predictor of things like educational achievement

11:32and then later on career achievement and success and SES and that kind of thing. So, you know, given that we all recognize how important our verbal abilities are, I think that it's really interesting that fiction is the one that seems to have the stronger influence. Plus, reading relates to social connection. In part, you know, reading can actually be a social practice. And so a lot of people, including a lot of older adults, belong to book clubs. So getting together to discuss different perspectives on a novel that everyone read

12:03is a great way to spend time and a great way to bond with others. And Raymond says reading books might even help us live longer. There's been a couple of really large studies, one in America and one in Finland, and they looked at older adults and they found that those that read more actually lived longer. And it wasn't a small effect. It was quite a large and substantial finding. And, you know, it's fascinating because we think of reading as a sedentary activity, right?

12:36And so it's not necessarily something that you would associate with physical health. But we don't know exactly why it is. We know that you don't see similar effects for reading magazines, for example, or newspapers. The effect was larger for reading books. And there's one sort of hint at why this might be. And that was one study that was done in America, where it looked like there was something along the lines of cognitive engagement or, you know, sort of preserved mental capacity that

13:09perhaps explained this greater longevity. And so there's a sort of related work demonstrating that those who read experience a slower cognitive decline associated with aging. So, you know, it makes sense. Reading is cognitively demanding as a process and also in the fact that it exposes us to all kinds of different ideas and perspectives and experiences. And it seems like that helps to keep our mind active and might even help us to live longer.

Reading difficulties and self concept

13:43With all these benefits of reading, it makes you wonder, what about if you struggle with reading? How does that impact your life? Because children seem to be little comparison machines. It does not take them very long for them to work out who finds it easy to read and who doesn't find it easy to read. Here's Professor Genevieve MacArthur again. So those students who are really struggling compared to their friends in the classroom, some of them will start saying to themselves, what's wrong with me? I am not a good reader. There's something wrong with me. I am a bad reader.

14:14Now, that statement unto itself represents something we call reading self-concept. So these students, they're actually struggling with their ability to learn to read and then they end up with poor reading self-concept. Then, as many of us will be familiar with, students can find themselves in a situation where they're asked to read in front of the class. Now, it's very natural. For example, if you're not good at something and you are asked to do it publicly, it becomes very anxiety-provoking because you don't want to look foolish in front of other people.

14:49You don't want the negative feedback. And so this poor self-concept can trigger anxieties around reading. And so then you start disengaging from reading, which means you are not getting as much reading practice, which means that you fall even behind in your actual reading ability. And so this officious cycle forms between struggling to learn to read and the awareness that you're struggling to learn to read and this anxiety and the disengagement. And so that is, at this point in time, what the science is suggesting is happening.

15:24As Genevieve says, this is what the current research suggests, but it is still a working hypothesis. If you want more information on reading difficulties like dyslexia, check out the links in our show notes.

15:38From ABC Radio National, this is All in the Mind. I'm Sanaa Kadar. Today, the facts about fiction with producer Rose Kerr. Rose, we've heard about how reading impacts the brain and our cognition. But aside from those kinds of benefits, there's like a real emotional benefit to reading too, isn't there? Yeah. And I think anyone who's read a book that has made them laugh or maybe even shed a tear can relate to the idea that reading does make us feel strongly towards the characters in

16:13the book, like for good or for bad.

Fiction and empathy

16:15And to explore this idea a bit further, I spoke to an author, J.A. Stephens, also known as Jess, whose debut novel explores a bunch of perspectives we don't often hear from. If you could tell me who you are and what you do, like however you'd like to introduce yourself in the episode. All right then. Well, first of all, I'd say I am very, very autistic. I've got ADHD. I am very much into true crime.

16:48I am a Christmas tragic. I am an appalling public speaker. And probably then, after all that, if there's anything left, I'm a wannabe author. Oh, I love that so much. That's beautiful. Could you describe the book to anyone who's never picked it up? How would you describe it? A Change of Pace is a queer and disability normative Regency romance with a bit of adventure, suspense and spice. And it's just a bit of everything for everyone.

17:20The book was inspired by not seeing many stories that represented her loved ones. Basically, I was watching a TV series called Gentleman Jack with my partner, and that was a beautiful, fun, queer story based on a true character from history. Don't want to give too many spoilers away, but it sort of did have a happy ever after. But it was still a bit of a closeted love story. So, at the end, you know, the two female characters had to keep their romance and their love story secret from others.

17:53And it was set in sort of the Regency period. And I guess I can only describe what followed was one of my more sort of impassioned spiels about oppression and the sort of significant and enduring injustices in the world that was sort of caused by prejudice and discrimination, sort of both historically and now. And how utterly unfair it is that both my trans partner, Beck, and my daughter, Lily, who has Down syndrome, can't just pick up a book and readily see themselves reflected in it

18:27positively without some sort of trope or catch or, you know, be maligned in some way. I sort of realised that I needed to change that. And if it helped others along the way, then, you know, so be it. And I think it's really healthy to be reminded that ours isn't the only perspective out there. And I think reading and reading broadly helps us to do that.

18:57We tend to surround ourselves with like-minded people. And that's not a criticism. It's just human nature because it's super comfortable to do that. People are often intimidated by and sometimes even scared of things that they don't understand or have no experience with. And this makes it easier for, you know, politicians and the like to use those kinds of fears or

19:29mistrust to further divide us. So reading can, you know, be a really gentle or non-confrontational way to sort of bridge that gap. There's quite a bit of evidence that reading helps us to better understand other people. And I think that makes sense because that's what fiction is. It's portrayals and representations of other people, their thoughts, their experiences, their emotions. Professor Raymond Ma describes the connection between reading fiction and empathy as a bi-directional

20:01relationship. We know that reading fiction can help to hone the same sort of mental processes that we use to understand other people, including empathy and perspective taking. We also know that it's possible that stories contain like concrete social knowledge about the world that we can learn and then apply to the real world. So there's these two different ways in which stories can help us become better at navigating the complex social world in which we live in. But it's also true that the better our empathy, the better our perspective taking, the easier

20:34it is for us to understand stories. And so I do think that it's this, you know, bi-directional relationship whereby stories help to foster empathy. The better you are at empathy, the easier it is to understand stories. And there can be this kind of like upward spiral or positive feedback loop where reading increases empathy, empathy makes reading easier, makes us to read more, and then helps us to grow our empathy and so forth. Raymond says there are challenges that come with this kind of research.

21:07For example, the effects of reading fiction only really emerge after prolonged and frequent exposure. It's also something that we do voluntarily and in our own free time. It's not something that we can really take people and force them just to read one thing and nothing else, you know, for months on end. You know, that's terribly difficult. But we have come up with a bunch of clever ways to look at this. In terms of the neuroscience, what we find is that the parts of the brain that become active

21:37while we're reading narrative fiction are the same parts of the brain that are activated when we're trying to understand other people. And so that's consistent with this idea that, you know, while reading stories, we're using the same kind of mental processes that we would use to understand others. I think when I started, it was really quite a small area. And in fact, one of my supervisors in graduate school told me that he was really worried that I wouldn't get a job, you know, because of this obscure topic that I was studying.

22:07Luckily, I did get a job. And honestly, the area has just exploded. And so I would say within the last five to 10 years, there's just been an enormous amount of fascinating work on this topic. And so at this point, I would say we know quite a bit from a lot of different fields of psychology. And so that's been really encouraging. The effects of reading can be seen amongst children and adults, but sometimes in different ways. So there have been studies with very young children around the age of four.

22:40And what's interesting about this developmental stage is that early on, you know, before the age of four, around the age of three or so, children actually don't understand that other people have minds. They don't understand that other people have thoughts and feelings that can differ from their own. And then they develop this ability, you know, around four and six years of age. And what we find is that children that are exposed to more storybooks, they're actually further along in this developmental process compared to others of the same age.

23:14It also plays an important role for teenagers working through new life experiences. There have been studies that have interviewed adolescents, and they talk about how books have really helped them to sort of reflect on their emotions and gain greater insight into, you know, some of the challenging parts of their life. And regardless of your age, as we've said, stories introduce us to other perspectives. We don't really have access to the interior lives of others, except through things like fiction.

23:44You can also experience these effects from other types of media, like movies or audiobooks. I think that as long as what we have is a representation of other people, their experiences, their interior life, that we would see kind of similar results, similar benefits. It's the content that really matters so much more than the modality. And so I don't think people should feel guilty at all for listening to audiobooks, for example. Ah, yes. The debate about audiobooks. While researching this episode and in conversations with other readers, there's this incredibly

24:20hotly debated topic of whether or not listening to audiobooks counts as reading. So I asked Raymond if listening to your novel still comes with benefits. I mean, I do think all are good. I don't think that they're the same. They're only marginally different. You really are getting, like, almost entirely the same content. You might interact with that content a little bit differently in that when you're reading a book, you can maybe take a little bit more time. You can linger. You might actually go back and reread a paragraph or a sentence.

24:53If you come across a word that you don't understand, you might stop and look it up in the dictionary. You aren't likely to do those things while listening to the audiobook. But I do think that you're getting, you know, most of the content in mostly the same way while listening to the audiobook. And so it's certainly nothing to be ashamed of. And I think they serve different purposes, right? Like, you cannot read a book while you empty the dishwasher. It's going to be a mess and you're going to break something. So, you know, each of these things has their purpose and has their benefits.

Representation and hope

25:31How did you feel reading the book? I should say which time. I've read so many versions of it. And I've loved them all. This is Bec, Jess's fiancée and partner of 10 years. I was just so proud of Jess for creating this amazing, inclusive world from her imagination and from her desire to create somewhere where I could see myself and where Lily could see herself in a story that was positive and represented trans women as being able to be strong and successful and just sort of everyday members of that society.

26:02It's so powerful, you know, so that's so wonderful. And I know it would be similarly wonderful for other trans women out there because for many of us, we do just want to see ourselves represented as we are, which is just individuals being ourselves and wanting to live sort of ordinary lives in our society today. I think one of the things that fiction does really well is that it can model alternatives. And what Jess's book does is give you a beacon of hope.

26:34And I think we know that hope is a really powerful psychological tool. You can use a book for so much. You can relieve someone's anxiety. You can take someone out of their daily grind. You can relieve their mental load. You can make their life a little bit more joyful. Reading can be such a beautiful experience. You can make people cry. You can connect them with the past. You can bring them nostalgia. You can bring them joy.

27:05You can bring them all sorts of things. You can provide them with sort of romance and passion and all the feelings. But you can also create hate. And as an author, you can do a whole lot. And I like to think that through writing this book, my intent was pure. It was written for my partner and my daughter. But I wanted it to get into the hands of people who needed it, who needed to feel that warmth

27:36and love and at home and wanted to feel safe. And, yeah, that's really all I can say about it. That is author J.A. Stevens and her fiancé, Beck. You also heard from Professor Raymond Marr from York University in Toronto. Thanks also to Dr. Lily Yu from Macquarie University and Professor Genevieve MacArthur from the Australian Centre for the Advancement of Literacy and the Dyslexia Spelled Foundation.

28:09This episode was reported by science producer Rose Kerr. Thanks, Rose. Thanks, Sana. Thanks also to senior producer James Bullen and sound engineer Tim Jenkins.

28:20Before I go, if you are passionate about reading, make sure you have your say in Radio National's annual Top 100 Books Countdown. This year, we are celebrating Australian writing in all its many forms. So, head to the Radio National website to cast your vote and just make sure you do that before the 1st of October, because that is the deadline. We'll also pop a link to it in our show notes. That is it for All in the Mind this week. I'm Sana Kadar. Thanks for listening. I'll catch you next time. I'll catch you next time.

29:18You've been listening to an ABC podcast. Discover more great ABC podcasts, live radio and exclusives on the ABC Listen app.