Can Reading Books Make You Smarter?

Ever since I started writing on my blog, I’ve been vouching on the importance of reading books and how it makes a difference in our lives. But can reading books make you smarter? Does reading a book keep the neurologist or Alzheimer’s away? Can readers say that they used books to increase their IQ level?

In this post, I’m going to discuss about how can reading books make you smarter, especially when it comes to fluid intelligence that is how you identify the patterns, crystallized intelligence that means what facts you know, brain connectivity and emotional intelligence or empathy. 

History of IQ (Intelligent Quotient) 

Intelligence is quite a tricky characteristic to define. IQ is the most common tool used to measure intelligence. It was developed by German psychologist William Stern in the early 1990’s. This system uses scored from an intelligence test along with age to determine where an individual fall in the intelligent spectrum compared to other people. So, intelligence is a combination of the abilities to gain new knowledge, solve problems and engage in abstract reasoning. Of course, IQ doesn’t measure the intellectual ability perfectly. 

Education, culture, and other facets of a person’s history can alter how they respond to some questions in the IQ tests. That means people with same latent ability can potentially have different IQ’s and that the test has some measurement bias. When such differential questions are identified, they are removed from the test. But if the test creators have blind posts then those inevitably emerge in the test itself.

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Achieving a high score in an IQ test also relies on an individual’s motivation and believe that this test matters. So, none of these really answers our topic: can reading book increases a person’s intelligence and make them smarter? 

What Reading Books Does to Our Minds? 

Reading books does alter our minds in myriad ways, not all of which emerges from the IQ scores.  

1) Fluid Intelligence 

This is more abstract as it involves our ability to detect patterns, solves problems and come to an overall understanding not connected with the crystallized intelligence. Reading books and fluid intelligence have a reciprocal relationship. Reading books trains our brain to be better at detecting more meaningful patters. As we are able to make these connections, we get more better to understand what we read.  

2) Crystallized Intelligence 

Reading books allows us to build crystallized intelligence which is all of the factual knowledge, data and figures that a person knows, also called as the “Book Smarts”. As we read more books, we tend to add more to our bank of information. 

3) Brain Connectivity 

The most fascinating facet of whether reading books can make your smarter is the way it increases our brain connectivity. Reading books not only engages the part of our brain handling language but it also creates activity in portions that handle our sensations and movements. When we read books, a part of our mind steps into the body of the characters in the story. This connection remains with us for a period even after we’ve completed reading. 

Researchers involved in a study conducted by Robert Harris on the undergraduates being assigned to read the novel Pompeii found that the links between the left temporal cortex, the central sulcus which is the part of the brain handling our movements and physical feelings and the brain’s language center remained enhanced. It concluded that when we read our body feels more.  

4) Emotional Intelligence 

The emotional intelligence is our ability to make connections. In the year 2013, two psychologists, Emanuele Castano and David Comer Kidd published a paper which found that reading fiction improves an individual’s theory of mind- a measurement of a person’s empathy and ability to understand how others think and feel. As per this study, those who read fiction are significantly better at identifying other people’s emotions as the same psychological processes are used for navigating fiction and real relationships. 

I am quoting author Derek Beres here, “Reading is a great way to practice being human.” And some of us could certainly use that practice. 

Can Reading Books Make You Smarter? 

Coming back to our topic today, reading books is useful not in terms of whether or not is improves our intelligence but rather how it changes the way our brain works. Reading books may not be able to alter our baseline abilities but it increases the number of facts we know, increases our empathy, allows us to be better at identifying the patterns and make our neurological connections more pervasive. Though reading may not be a magic pill to increase intelligence but it can and does make a difference in people who pick up a book.

Do you mind sharing your thoughts?