The more that you read, the more things you will know. The more that you learn, the more places you’ll go.
- Dr Seuss
Reading is the seed of imagination and food for the soul. But we’re not all equal in the eyes of a book. Some of us will read as you’d breath: to fill up and live. Some of us will read out of duty, to acquire information on a given topic and insight on situations. Some of us will avoid reading like the plague.
If you read, you can read for pleasure as a leisure, books about adventures and passions; you can read for self-development, about lives of great people or new life hacks; you can read by curiosity, about history, war and grandiose acts. You might have a passion for books, see them as repository of the soul of the book itself. You can see books as simple objects and not being fuss about having a print version. You can be completely indifferent about books, seeing them as nothing but reminder of childhood PTSD.
In an era of technological advances, print books might appear more and more old-fashioned, or even obsolete, in favour of e-books and audiobooks. One can argue that reading is incredibly time consuming and you can’t do anything else while reading a print book (is there anything to do but enjoy the book in your hands?!). Fair enough. E-books are portable and you can carry as many books as your device will allow without adding any weight to your bag. An indisputable advantage. Audiobooks are even more so practical that it is a hand-free practice, allowing you to do whatever else at the same time (e.g., running, cooking, walking to work). I tend to get to absorb in a story to be able to listen to a book and do anything else at the same time – I can already see myself tripping on my own foot if I attempt to listen to a book while running! Point is: nowadays, everyone, even someone that hate reading, can access the world of wonder a book contains.
Is it the same though? Is listening to a book as good as reading? Apparently so, a new research claims. Nine people were recruited for a fMRI (functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging, i.e., brain scan) study – isn’t wonderful that you only need 9 people for a fMRI study when you need at least a hundred for anything else? The beauty of science… Anyways: those 9 people had their brains scanned as they were either listening to or reading stories. In order to make those 2 conditions as comparable as possible, they did not present the stories in form of a text, as this post is presented, but as ‘rapid serial visual presentation”. This method presents words on a screen, one at a time, and the words are displayed for as long as it would take to read them out loud. In short, people were “exposed” to the words for the same duration in the reading and listening conditions. This allowed the researchers to directly compare the impact of each word on the brain and test for reading vs listening differences.
What did they find? Each word is processed based on its meaning: ‘goat’ and ‘happiness are processed in 2 different areas of the brain, and we know that based because on the fMRI 2 different regions of the brain “light up” for ‘goat’ and ‘happiness’. We already knew that. What’s new is that the researchers found that this was true whether participants read or listened to the words. Your brain reacts the same way to information if you hear it or if you read it. This came as a surprise for the team: listening and reading involve different sensory modalities (i.e., different senses: your eyes or your ears), and yet! When presented with information, the brain deals with the same way regardless of the way it’s presented. Hurray for the partisans of audiobooks!
Couple words of caution though: the way those 9 people “read” the words was not natural at all. It was necessary for the sake of the study and to allow precise comparisons, but it is not how one read naturally. First, it takes less time to read a word than it does to say it out loud. Second, even though it’s not a problem for the key results of this new study, it says nothing about the comparison between print books and audiobooks.
Previous research have looked at the differences between reading something on a e-reader or as an audiobook and between reading something on an e-reader or in print (no comparison between audiobook and print still). What did they find?
A first study compared audiobook to e-text to both listening and reading the information. The researchers did not find any difference between the 3 modalities in term of general comprehension or retention of the information (i.e., how much you remember). This is in line with the results of the study presented above: there is no difference between e-books and audiobooks in how the brain processes the information, in what you understand, or in how much you remember.
A second study tried a more naturalistic setting, something more “real-life” like. They investigated 16-year old in schools, in Norway. Here, the scientists asked the students to either read texts in print or as PDF on a computer screen. And there was a difference: the participants that read texts in print had a better understanding of the texts than those who read them on the computer screen. This result was replicated in adults (i.e., comparable results were found): people that read a mystery story in print were better at reorganising key events than those that read it on a e-reader.
Putting A and B together, it would be easy to conclude of the superior power of physical, print books over both e-books and audiobooks: if print books are better than e-books, and e-books are the same as audiobooks, print books must be better than audiobooks, right? Unfortunately, that’s not how science works. We would need a study assessing the difference between print books and audiobooks. And also assess for personal differences and include a variety of people with reading/writing difficulties (e.g., dyslexia). We might then find that the audiobooks are better suited for people who hate reading or who have difficulties, and print books might be even better for people who love reading in the first place.
If we’re not all equal in the eyes of a book, the technological advances at least ensure that everybody can access the wonders hidden behind a cover – literally or metaphorically.
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