Remember your parents telling you to put down the remote and pick up a book? While that advice felt timeless, the science behind this common advice has been mixed. Now, a large-scale study led by UCSF imaging scientists sheds new light on this debate. By analyzing brain scans (MRI) and cognitive tests from over 8,000 adolescents in the US, they investigated how reading and television habits are linked to brain structure and cognitive abilities.
Key to this research was data made possible by the Adolescent Brain and Cognitive Development (ABCD) study. A longitudinal study that includes high-quality MRI brain scans and detailed information about the daily habits of thousands of US adolescents, including how much time they spend reading and watching TV. The sheer size and comprehensive nature of this study, with consistent data collection methods across different locations, allowed the researchers to tease apart the relationships between these habits, cognitive skills, and brain structure, while accounting for other factors that could influence the results. While previous studies hinted at the negative effects of screen time and the positive impacts of reading on the developing brain, this research is unique in its scale and its direct examination of brain structures.
The findings strongly suggest that reading is indeed beneficial for the developing brain, while excessive TV viewing may have a negative impact. Adolescents who reported spending more time reading for pleasure performed better on cognitive tests and showed an increase in the size of specific areas of the brain's outer layer (cortex). Conversely, more TV time was linked to slightly lower cognitive performance and subtle decreases in the size of some brain regions. Importantly, these associations held true even after considering the influence of factors like age, socioeconomic background, and genetics. While their results provide some hard data in support of your parents’ advice, the researchers caution that their results show associations rather than causal relationships and that many other unmeasured factors contribute to the complex brain changes that occur during development.
Andreas Rauschecker, MD, PhD, and Pierre Nedelec , MSc, were co first authors of “Neurocognitive and brain structure correlates of reading and television habits in early adolescence”, published in Scientific Reports, with senior author Leo Sugrue, MD, PhD.
