People who are good at reading have different brains

LUND (SWEDEN): The number of people who read for fun appears to be steadily dropping. Fifty per cent of UK adults say they don’t read regularly (up from 42 per cent in 2015) and almost one in four young people aged 16-24 say they’ve never been readers, according to research by The Reading Agency.

But what are the implications? Will people’s preference for video over text affect our brains or our evolution as a species? What kind of brain structure do good readers actually have? My new study, published in Neuroimage, has found out.

I analysed open-source data from more than 1,000 participants to discover that readers of varying abilities had distinct traits in brain anatomy.