Why reading books and writing longhand is better for learning
Reading is a young activity in evolutionary terms. Humans have been speaking in some form for hundreds of thousands of years; we are born with the ability to acquire speech etched into our neurones.
The earliest writing emerged only 6,000 years ago, and every act of reading remains a version of what my son is learning: identifying the special species of physical objects known as letters and words, using much the same neural circuits as we use to identify trees, cars, animals and telephone boxes.
My son is 18 months old and I've been reading books with him since he was born. Over the past six months he has started to recognise a few letters and numbers. He calls a capital Y a "yak" after a picture on the door of his room, and so on.
Reading is a young activity in evolutionary terms. Humans have been speaking in some form for hundreds of thousands of years; we are born with the ability to acquire speech etched into our neurones.
The earliest writing emerged only 6,000 years ago, and every act of reading remains a version of what my son is learning: identifying the special species of physical objects known as letters and words, using much the same neural circuits as we use to identify trees, cars, animals and telephone boxes.
It's not only words and letters that we process as objects. Texts themselves, so far as our brains are concerned, are physical landscapes. So it shouldn't be surprising that we respond differently to words printed on a page compared to words appearing on a screen; or that the key to understanding these differences lies in the geography of words in the world.
For her new book, , linguistics professor Naomi Baron conducted a survey of reading preferences among more than 300 university students from the US, Japan, Slovakia and Germany.
When given a choice between media ranging from printouts to smartphones, laptops, e-readers and desktops, 92 per cent of respondents replied that it was hard copy that best allowed them to concentrate.
