Professor Barbara Sahakian and Christelle Langley of the University of Cambridge recently published a review of the health effects of reading. According to them, the benefits seem to accumulate regardless of what you read or how you read, and there are further benefits if reading is social — for example in a book club or simply when reading to your children. Apart from keeping citizens out of mischief, reading also, among other things, helps ward off dementia.
Sahakian and her colleagues have found, among other things, that children who begin reading for pleasure at an early age tend to have better powers of concentration and memory, stronger executive functioning, better academic achievement later in life, fewer mental health problems, and healthier lifestyles, such as more sleep and less screen time.
Whew, quite a list. I was already out of breath just writing it. Of course, with statistical studies like these, one always has to ask what is cause and what is effect, because it is quite possible that children who already have these characteristics are simply more likely to take up reading.
That is surely part of the explanation, but on the other hand we also know that childhood is a particularly formative stage in life, and that habits acquired and experiences gained then can create permanent, or at least very lasting, attitudes, habits and preferences.
It brings to mind my oldest son, for example. He could already read before the age of five — he had taught himself — but he hated reading. The dislike continued well into school age, and when, in first grade, he still did not want to read anything voluntarily, not even his schoolbooks, I was somewhat worried about it.
Still, hopefully, I kept leaving different kinds of books lying around on tables, from children’s books to novels and non-fiction, in the hope that one of them would catch his interest. Then one day I saw him on the sofa leafing through Montgomery of Alamein’s excellent A History of Warfare. First he looked through the pictures, then he read the whole thick book from beginning to end — and he became a passionate reader. Not a warmonger, even though his reading habit began in such a military context.
According to Sahakian, the benefits of early reading are of course most obvious in verbal and literary contexts, but they also extend, for example, to mathematical ability. Later in life, they can be seen in things such as better stress management, more developed empathy, and, generally speaking, more tolerant attitudes. At the other end of the life span, people who remain active readers often develop dementia later and in a milder form, if they develop it at all.
In recent years, evidence has begun to accumulate that these and many other statistically observed effects are in fact at least partly neurological — that is, they are connected with measurable changes in the brain. Reading IS healthy.
But it is not worth turning that into a substitute for real life either, any more than any other single thing. Life is life, as the world-famous Finnish ski jumper, a.k.a. post-intellectual philosopher Matti Nykänen, would have said.
And life is at its best when it is rich and luxuriant, like a fallow field full of weeds.
Source: “Reading and associations with brain health, cognition, wellbeing and mental health,” Psychological Medicine (2026). DOI: 10.1017/S0033291726105625
