Audiobooks vs reading: What is better for your brain? Neurologists weigh in

The post drew on a 2019 study from UC Berkeley, published in the Journal of Neuroscience, in which nine adults (a small sample size) were placed in a brain scanner and given the same narrative story to listen to and read, while researchers mapped how the brain responded to the meaning of each word across both conditions.

The researchers found that once language moves past the initial stage of sensory processing, where the ear handles sound and the eye handles text, both pathways arrive at the same destination. The brain constructs meaning from words the same way regardless of how those words arrived.

The researchers concluded that “the semantic representations evoked by listening versus reading are almost identical,” and that the brain, at the level of meaning-making, does not distinguish between the two.

What the findings miss

The study shows that the brain does not care whether words arrive through the ear or the eye when it comes to meaning making. (Generated using AI)

For a certain corner of the internet, this was all that needed to be said, audiobook lovers rejoiced, and blew the raspberry at physical-book purists. The study, however, is narrower than its reception suggests.

The sample was a small and homogenous one, as all were young, highly educated (two of them the paper’s own authors), and the reading condition bore little resemblance to how anyone actually reads.

Rather than a page of text, participants watched individual words flash on a screen one at a time, timed to match the exact pace of the spoken audio. It was a controlled laboratory condition, designed to make the two modes as comparable as possible for brain scanning purposes. It should be noted though that the paper itself never uses the word book.

What the study establishes is that the brain does not care whether words arrive through the ear or the eye when it comes to meaning making. It does not establish that reading and listening are identical experiences, or that one offers no cognitive advantages over the other.

 

View this post on Instagram

 

A post shared by Josh Turknett (@brainjojosh)

What experts say

Dr Praveen Gupta, Chairman of the Mind, Brain and Spine Institute at Marengo Asia Hospitals in Gurugram, confirms that the findings align with clinical understanding of how the brain processes language. Both modes, he says, are “good for our brain,” and support cognitive health, but he draws a distinction in what each demands of the reader.

“Reading is harder for our brain,” he says. “It needs us to focus and control our eyes. It also needs us to go at our pace. This helps us pay attention and remember things. It even helps us think clearly. When we read we can really get into the details of what we are reading. We can understand things better and remember them longer.”

Listening is less demanding, says Dr Gupta, and more emotionally immediate by virtue of a human voice, and considerably more forgiving of the mind that occasionally drifts. “We can feel more emotions when we hear someone’s voice,” he says, something any audiobook listener who has wept on a morning commute (mea culpa while listening to The Goodbye Cat by Hiro Arikawa) will recognise.

Physical reading takes more effort, it requires one to set one’s own pace, hold one’s attention, and do the work of actively grappling with a text. That active effort, Dr Gupta says , tends to produce stronger comprehension and more durable memory. His practical counsel is to use both, strategically: “We should read when we need to understand something. We should listen when we need to be able to do things at the same time,” he says, adding, “the best way to learn is the way that keeps our brain working all the time.”

Turknett’s post makes a similar point in its third takeaway: “Where audio falls short is not in comprehension but in control. You cannot highlight, re-read a sentence, or flip back to check a detail as easily.” However, he also makes the point that a book collecting dust on the bookshelf is no better than one listened to as an audio book. What matters is whether you do something with what you took in.

In practice, most readers probably find their own version of this. Personally, after some trial and error during the long pandemic lockdowns, when cooking and cleaning swallowed my reading hours whole, I realised that I prefer to listen to celebrity memoirs and short fiction, but I would rather read books that are dense with ideas–the kind that make you stop mid-sentence, jot something down, disappear into a footnote, and then slowly circle back to the argument.

Reference

Deniz, F., Nunez-Elizalde, A.O., Huth, A.G. and Gallant, J.L. “The Representation of Semantic Information Across Human Cerebral Cortex During Listening Versus Reading Is Invariant to Stimulus Modality.” The Journal of Neuroscience, Sept. 25, 2019.