Name: What does reading on screens do to our brains? | BBC Ideas
Uploaded: 2021-10-28T23:05:10.000Z
Duration: 6 min 22 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

There's nothing less natural than reading.

Adverbs of manner

Reading is an acquired set of skills that literally changes the brain.

Everyone should be reading books. This is it.

Books are life experience, books are knowledge.

Without books, we wouldn't be human in the way that we are.

Literacy is one of the greatest inventions of the human species.

Reading is the blink of the eye in our evolutionary clock.

It's only six thousand years old, and it began in such a simple way

to mark how many wine vessels or sheep we had.

And with the birth of alphabetic systems,

we began to have an efficient means of remembering,

What reading does is exploit a principle of design

in the human brain, that allows it to make new connections

between visual regions, language regions,

It begins actually afresh in every new reader.

has to create a brand new circuit in their brain.

Reading a great story is so much more than entertainment.

Reading actually has many therapeutic benefits.

Bibliotherapy is the art of prescribing fiction

Claustrophobia, rage, exhaustion and the cure is Zorba The Greek.

Reading for the joy of it is one of the two key factors

All of these advantages and benefits happen as a result of literacy.

A physical process which slows your heartbeat and calms you down,

When we read at a surface level, we're just getting the information.

When we read deeply, we're using much more of our cerebral cortex.

Deep reading means that we make analogies, we make inferences,

which allows us to be truly critical, analytic, empathic, human beings.

but the book is just a delivery mechanism.

There's all sorts of amazing books which are being written deliberately

These kind of new mediums, they are giving a voice

who don't have to kind of get through a bottleneck.

Stops us from having this kind of conditioning

and it actually allows people just to talk and share stories

It doesn't matter the medium, it doesn't matter how you get it,

And the book maybe provides this illusion that this is it.

It's never been it, it's a way into a thought process.

We brought together scholars and scientists from over 30 countries,

to do research about the impact of digitisation on reading.

We found that there is, what they call, a screen inferiority.

There is a lot that can be equally well read on your smartphone,

that is cognitively or emotionally challenging.

Reading on a screen leads to poorer reading comprehension

The reality is, it's not what or how much we read

but how we read, that's really important.

The very volume is having negative effects because to absorb that much,

The reading brain has a plastic circuitry.

The circuit will reflect the characteristics

are going to be reflected in the circuit.

If we don't train those capacities, we may eventually lose

the ability to understand more complex content,

and also perhaps to engage and to imagine.

The human imagination is a fantastic thing - we're very flexible.

We find ways of doing what we want with the technology we've got.

I think we'll see a lot more short story connections,

and I think we'll see a lot more shorter books.

because children's attention span has got shorter.

The chapters are short, it's incredibly visual.

Just and people can be bi and trilingual,

my hope is that we will be developing a biliterate brain.

We can discipline ourselves to choose the medium

that is best suited for what we're reading

so that we don't lose the extraordinary gift

So, what would happen if we stopped reading books?

Subtitles ListPlay Video

What does reading on screens do to our brains? | BBC Ideas

anxiety

discipline

eventually

extraordinary