Reading shaped the modern mind. Its disappearance will reshape it. Cognitive scientists are starting to understand what these changes might look like. I asked a dozen of them what happens to our brains when we stop reading. Several were amused by my rudimentary question. “Everything that happens to you changes the brain,” Dan Willingham, a professor at the University of Virginia, told me. “Literally reading a word changes your brain for a few hours at least—and, if you know how to measure it right, for much longer than that.” He was trying to reassure me: If everything changes the brain, then almost no single action matters all that much.
But what if you consistently replace one kind of action (reading a word) with another (watching an Instagram Reel)? One of the most robust findings in neuroscience is that people’s brains master what they practice. If we fill our time with short-form videos instead of books, our reading skills atrophy. We have less background knowledge to aid comprehension. There’s no danger of spontaneous mass illiteracy, but the complex cognitive skills that reading fosters start to degrade. The library of the mind falls into disrepair.
Reading books is a workout for the attention span. The more you read, the easier it is to read, and the more you’re rewarded with new understanding. Eventually the process is more pleasurable than it is challenging. But as with physical exercise, the converse is true as well: The less you read, the more difficult it is to read, and the rockier the path to acquiring knowledge.
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