Read books to live longer

 

Anish Moonka

@anishmoonka

A Yale study tracked 3,635 people for 12 years. The ones who read books for 30 minutes a day lived almost 2 years longer. Your average book takes about 5 hours to finish. For a $15 paperback and a few nights on the couch, that’s a wild return. The gap was 23 months. Didn’t matter how old you were, how much money you had, what your education looked like, or whether you were dealing with depression. If you read books, you were 20% less likely to die during the study. Newspapers and magazines didn’t do the same thing. The researchers found that books specifically were keeping people’s brains sharper for longer, and that’s what was driving the survival gap. Emory University wanted to see what books actually do inside your head. They put 21 people in brain scanners every morning for 19 straight days while they read a novel in the evenings. The connections between different parts of their brains got stronger, especially in areas that handle language and physical sensation. Those changes were still showing up on scans 5 days after they finished the book. The lead researcher Gregory Berns called it shadow activity. Like muscle memory, but for your brain. A 14-year study found that people who read at least once a week had 46% lower odds of losing their mental sharpness as they aged. Separate work out of Rush University Medical Center showed that older adults who stayed mentally active through reading, writing, and puzzles experienced 32% less decline in memory and thinking ability. Then there’s stress. A University of Sussex study found that just 6 minutes of reading cut stress levels by 68%. Music only managed 61%. Drinking tea or coffee, 54%. Going for a walk got 42%. The money angle is interesting too. A European study tracked 5,280 men across 9 countries. Kids who grew up with more than 10 books in the home earned 21% more for each additional year of school they completed. For kids with fewer than 10 books, it was just 5%. A separate 27-country study of over 70,000 people found that children from homes full of books finished 3 more years of school regardless of how educated or wealthy their parents were. Pew data from the U.S. shows 86% of people earning over $75K read at least one book in the past year, compared to 70% of those earning under $30K. He’s right. The average book takes 3 to 5 hours. But those hours buy you brain connections that last for days and mental sharpness that holds up over decades, with a real shot at almost 2 more years alive.