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? 

Can Reading Books Help You Become a Better Person?

We already know that the more people read books, the better their verbal skills including their vocabulary. According to Professor Keith Oatley at the University of Toronto, “Literary fiction works best, especially fiction where the character is the center of what it’s all about.” Over a decade ago, graduate students in his lab started a series of experiments to explore whether reading fiction could help people understand each other. They found that fiction, especially the narrative fiction directly improves our social skills such as reducing the bias and improves our ability to understand other’s beliefs, intentions and desires. Later on, the brain scanning experiments supported those findings showing how stories and vivid imagery activate the hippocampus, a hub of our brain for emotion and memory.

Professor Oatley attributes that as we immerse ourselves in a story involving complex characters and unfamiliar circumstances, it is like working through a simulation, where we absorb and practice new emotions and perspective. We experience what it is like to be in someone else’s shoe. Reading literary fiction helps us understand the human rights of others by improving our empathy toward people in other parts of the world we may never visit, who seem quite different than ourselves. For example, in the Khaled Hosseini's "The Kite Runner", we wade through the lives of Amir and Hassan’s childhood days in Afghanistan and Amir’s life in America with twisting experience of his return back to the Afghanistan under Taliban control. 

Different types of fiction provide different social stimulations. Romances guide us through how a person picks a partner such as in "Me Before You" by Jojo Moyes. On the other hand, mystery stories involve navigate the relations between oneself and the antagonist as in the work by thriller author Ruth Rendell or crime writer P. D. James.  

Reading fiction is not just passing the time, it has societal implications about how we human beings live with each other and how we understand each other. Reading books can help you fall asleep, escape from reality, lower your stress through laughter or tears and also offer exposure to perspectives that are different from your own.  

Let us now discuss about the other ways how reading books can make you a better person, according to science. 

1. Reading Books Make You Feel Happier with Yourself and Your Life 

In a survey conducted by Josie Billington at the University of Liverpool on 4,164 adults found many interesting differences between those who read regularly and those who don’t. Readers have reported being less depressed and less stressed and having higher level of self-esteem and a greater ability to cope up with challenges. When compared to the non-readers, they had stronger awareness of social issues and cultural diversity and scored higher in terms of feeling close to friends and their community. 

2. It Raise Your Intelligence 

As per the researchers at the University of Edinburgh and King's College London who tested 1,890 pairs of twins five times from the ages 7 to 16 for their IQ and reading ability, found that the kids with better reading ability compared to their twins had higher verbal and nonverbal cognitive ability. The authors speculate that while reading books help you to remember facts, it also helps them practice in abstract thinking through the process of imagining a book’s plot and putting yourself in place of the characters.

3. Reading Books Protect Your Memory 

According to the study published in Neurology, the medical journal of the American Academy of Neurology, the brain-stimulating activities like reading books help your brain as you age. They conducted tests on the memory and the thinking ability of 294 people every year for about six years before their deaths, which on an average occurred at age 89. Those who reported doing mentally stimulated activities like reading early and late in life had a slower rate of memory decline compared to those who hadn’t. The rate of decline was reduced by about 32 percent in people who were mentally active in their later years as compared to those with only average mental activity. 

Don’t worry if you aren’t a big reader- because studies have also demonstrated an improved empathy after watching television shows. I’ll be discussing about Reading Books Vs. Watching Movies Based on Books: Which is Better? in my upcoming posts. 

Now, some evidence suggests that reading literary fiction broadens our mind and also improves our ability to empathize with others. In words, reading books not only impacts our IQ (Intellectual Quotient) but EQ (Emotional Quotient) as well. To conclude, reading a good book can make you a better person. 

Until then, this is Nyasa signing off. 

I will highly appreciate sharing your love by leaving your thoughts below.