Reading is essentially a mental workout. It actively strengthens and expands your brain's cognitive networks, directly driving how you acquire, process, and retain information.
Truth be told, reading is the ultimate cognitive enhancer. Even in an era dominated by generative AI, smartphones, and short-form digital media.
In fact, the way we read has changed more in the last decade than in the previous century. So what do we actually know about what reading does for the mind?
In his book, "The Perks of Being a Bookworm: The Science of the Benefits of Reading" (2026), Falk Huettig, senior investigator at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, brings together research spanning psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, and education to answer that question.
The result is a systematic account of how literacy reshapes memory, attention, language processing, and reasoning – and even abilities readers might not expect, like face recognition.
Cognitive enhancement is having a moment, with people turning to better sleep, exercise, nutrition, stress management, and tools like caffeine or neurostimulation in search of a sharper mind.
According to Huettig, reading has largely flown under the radar.
One of the more surprising threads in the book concerns face recognition. A long-standing idea in cognitive neuroscience holds that because reading is a relatively recent cultural invention, the brain has no dedicated reading network of its own, so literacy training has to borrow space from older visual systems, including the one used for recognising faces.
“Neuroscientists have proposed that the development of reading expertise may therefore partially displace or encroach upon the face recognition network in the brain”, Huettig (right) explains.
“This postulated cortical ‘invasion’ could result in a measurable decline in face or object recognition performance, as neural resources are reallocated to support the newly acquired reading skill”.
Huettig’s own research points the other way. “Our alternative perspective challenges the idea of destructive competition by proposing that learning to read may actually enhance sensitivity to faces and other visual object categories, rather than intrusively co-opting existing face recognition territory”, he says.
In studies conducted in India comparing literate and illiterate adults, his team found that “such co-opting leads to functional fine-tuning, where older networks are not diminished but rather adapted and even enhanced. We confirmed this explanation in behavioral studies: literate people were better at face recognition than illiterate people”.
The book argues that literacy keeps developing long after someone learns to decode text.
“Reading proficiency does not end once a reader can fluently decode a writing system”, says Huettig. “Avid readers continue to automatize and refine these subprocesses and their coordination, training both lower- and, with increasing practice, higher-level cognitive functions.
As a result, literate people come to ‘see’ the world through a fundamentally different lens than those who are illiterate or less literate”. Few people, he notes, ever reach the very top: “only a small proportion of individuals reach the highest levels of critical reading in international assessments such as the PISA tests”.
Content matters too: “It matters a great deal what people read”, Huettig says. “Reaching these advanced levels of literacy requires regular engagement with sophisticated texts, along with the development of strong critical thinking and reasoning skills”.
On format, the picture is more nuanced than “print good, screens bad. Meta-analyses have found inferior reading comprehension when text is read on digital screens”, Huettig notes, but he points to self-regulation as the likely driver: “Readers tend to regard analogue print as a more appropriate medium for ‘serious’ reading than screens, and monitor their behavior accordingly. As a result, they exert more cognitive effort for the task at hand”.
Still, he’s cautious about overstating the case: “The existing body of research does not support the simplified inference that print always results in better reading outcomes than digital reading”.
Audiobooks, meanwhile, can deliver some of reading’s benefits at a distance. “Listening to audiobooks can expose listeners to rare and sophisticated words, infrequent grammatical constructions, and complex narrative structures: elements that are not commonly found in everyday speech”, he says.
But the full picture requires the real thing: “The full spectrum of the benefits of reading is only obtained from reading text”.
And Huettig’s advice runs counter to a popular instinct: don’t over-simplify. “Simplifying texts to align with shrinking vocabulary and declining grammatical proficiency among young people may be counterproductive”, he warns.
“Relying too heavily on human- or AI-generated readability scores, or defaulting to auto-correct for ‘better words’ and ‘better grammar’, can dilute the richness of written expression. Instead, prioritizing quality writing, memorable prose, and the use of complex, uncommon, and sophisticated language may be a more effective strategy for maintaining and enhancing literacy”.
More broadly, he wants readers to come away with a sense of just how much is at stake: “Reading and writing are not merely neutral tools that humans use: they take hold of the mind and profoundly reshape it”.
The book closes by asking what happens to these benefits as reading habits keep shifting.
Huettig is cautious about firm predictions but draws a parallel with vinyl records: “What once was the standard medium for music has become a niche interest, sustained by a small group of enthusiasts… In a similar way, the written medium may persist in pockets of culture, or even become a nostalgic fad for future generations, before largely fading from everyday use”.
If literacy continues to decline globally, he suggests, the kinds of skills current intelligence tests measure may decline with it, and he’s doubtful new technologies will simply compensate: “Mastering new, future technologies may compensate for the loss in cognitive abilities, but personally, I wouldn’t bet on that happening”.
Early endorsements describe the book as an original and accessible contribution to the science of reading, with reviewers from Oxford, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and CNRS/Aix-Marseille University praising its scope and clarity.
