Neuroscience shows that how we read—not just what we read—may fundamentally alter our cognitive abilities.
Your brain on screens is not the same as your brain on books. Neuroscience now shows that when we swap pages for pixels, it’s not just a convenient change of format—we are altering how our brains process and retain information, with significant implications for readers of all ages.
Reading Is Reading. Or Is It?
If books build better brains, a question emerges in our increasingly digital world: Does how we read matter as much as what we read?
As home and school environments change through technology, the assumption that “reading is reading” now faces scientific scrutiny.
These results point to what researchers have termed the “screen inferiority effect.”
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Results highlight that the benefits of reading depend, at least in part, on the reading medium itself.
The Hypnotic Effect of Screens
Tzipi Horowitz-Kraus, an associate professor at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology and the Kennedy Krieger Institute at Johns Hopkins University, sought to uncover the neural reasons underlying the “screen inferiority effect.”
She found that children who spent more time reading books have greater connections between brain regions involved in language processing and cognitive control. In contrast, the children who spent more time using screen-based media demonstrated fewer connections between these same regions.
“As developmental cognitive neuroscientists, we are afraid that certain abilities—like attention, processing speed, and inhibitory control—will not develop as they should,” Horowitz-Kraus told The Epoch Times, commenting on the impact of screens in early childhood.
Six weeks later, the children watching the screen performed significantly worse on tests of attention and showed brain wave alterations similar to those of children with ADHD. Reading from screens—even at this young age—makes it harder to pay attention to what’s being read.
Children who participated in interactive storytelling sessions showed significant improvement in visual attention scores after the intervention. The Epoch Times
Screen Exposure Changes Behavior
Researchers have a few theories for why we see these effects.
“Unlike traditional reading, [digital] readers must simultaneously manage content comprehension while navigating through the text, making constant decisions about scrolling, and maintaining their place in the material,” Katzir told The Epoch Times. “This ‘split attention’ effect means our working memory juggles multiple tasks at once, potentially reducing our capacity for deep comprehension.”
Interestingly, these disparities in attention can be traced back to differences in reading strategies between digital and print texts.
Researchers equipped 50 university students with devices that tracked their exact eye movements as they read a six-page science article. Half read the “traditional way”—on paper. The other half read on tablets. Although both groups spent the same amount of time with the material, what their eyes were doing told a completely different story.
Eye-tracking showed that print readers approached the text carefully—first skimming and taking in the broader landscape, then returning to examine areas of interest. Digital readers, in contrast, moved through the content like travelers on a one-way path, rarely backtracking even through more challenging sections.
Both groups were then tested on comprehension.
Despite spending equal time with the material, print readers scored 24 percent higher in their understanding of the content. Such a disparity could mean the difference between an A- and a C+ on an exam.
Print readers revisited pages significantly more often than digital readers across all six pages of the scientific article. The Epoch Times
Part of the reason for these differences in reading style comes from the qualities of the printed medium itself. Katzir said that reading a physical book leads to what she calls “embodied reading.”
“The tactile experience of holding a book, feeling its weight, and turning pages supports spatial memory and helps readers create a mental map of the text, aiding comprehension and recall,” Katzir said.
“Screens tend to encourage what researchers call a ‘shallowing effect’ in our reading behavior,” Katzir added. “Instead of sustained, focused reading, we tend to skip between sections more frequently and engage in surface-level scanning rather than deep analysis. This leads to weaker memory formation, particularly for sequential details, as readers often resort to spotting keywords rather than processing the text thoroughly.”
Diane Mizrachi, a research librarian at the University of California, Los Angeles, regularly encounters the effects of “embodied reading” in students around campus and movie actors in Los Angeles.
“With the actors, they talk about how they learn their roles through movement and mobility. And so, a huge reason for preferring print is the tangibility and the quality of the text being physical and real,” Mizrachi told the Epoch Times.
“For them, it’s really an absorption of the text into their bodies and their souls.”
Toward an Integrated Future
Even with these findings, researchers have yet to conclude that screens are all bad—more research is necessary to fully determine their effects.
The illustrator Arthur Radebaugh imagined a future in which technology would revolutionize education: teachers would be computerized, students would learn by pushing buttons, and screens would overtake the classroom. These predictions may have seemed optimistic when he made them in the 1950s, but life today paints a more complex picture.
May 25, 1958 edition of Arthur Radebaugh’s Sunday comic, Closer Than We Think.
The future Radebaugh envisioned has arrived, but not as he imagined. The most promising path forward isn’t all-digital or all-print but deliberately designed reading experiences that leverage the strengths of each medium. As Horowitz-Kraus says, “We cannot step back—the technology is here. But we cannot ditch the books.”
