Mr. Putter practiced his story.
. . .
He turned the pages.
He read with gusto.
“Gusto makes everything more exciting,”
Mr. Putter told Tabby.
from Mr. Putter & Tabby Turn the Page
written by Cynthia Rylant
illustrated by Arthur Howard
Houghton Mifflin Horcourt, 2014
Unlike Mr. Putter, even when my cat (Yofi, not Tabby) is as close as my lap, I read silently., only sometimes with gusto.
I read books on my easy-to-hold phone. There’s more room on my lap for Yofi that way. The phone is easy to see, too. With its tiny backlit screen, little pages, and large font, I turn the pages fast, even though I’m a pretty slow reader.
I read on my reading chair in the living room, I read in the car (when someone else is driving), and I read in bed. I can read while I wait till my dental hygienist is ready to clean my teeth, and when I’m enjoying a beautiful spring day on my back porch. E-books are in short, portable.
I also read physical books. Especially when there are pictures: photos in biographies and histories, or illustrations in picture books and those for younger (and older) kids. There’s something comforting about holding a book and turning the actual pages. If I need a light, the lamp shines softly over my right shoulder. It’s easier on my eyes, too.
So, I wondered which format is better, if one indeed is.
Turns out, even though it doesn’t feel active to my couch-potato self, reading a physical book is an active endeavor. For my brain, though, not my body.
Our brains process information differently when we read physical books and when we read digital books. According to Kerry Benson in a 2020 article in BrainFacts.org, we focus our attention on a non-moving object when we read a physical book. She likens reading print material to a kind of meditation. We become immersed in what we are reading.
Anne Mangen, a literacy professor in Norway and Lauren Singer Trakhman of the University of Maryland agree that digital reading is better for scanning headlines or getting to the main idea of a subject. If retention, comprehension, and attention to details is the object, though, stick to a physical book.
Mangen continues, “[digital] reading impairs comprehension particularly for longer, more complex texts…digital media trains our brains to process information more rapidly and less thoroughly.
An early study for the marketing research company Millward Brown gave participants connected to brain scanning equipment advertisements on a screen and ads on a printed card. When they analyzed their data, they found that print materials were more likely to activate the medial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that helps us identify with others. Also how we rate ourselves on a self-esteem scale, our evaluation of our own personality traits, and how we process our emotions.
It’s why we identify with the main character in a story we are reading. Is she like me? What would I do in a similar situation? When we identify with the characters, we are building empathy in ourselves.
A YouTube from the BBC World Service, “Why reading isn’t ‘natural,’” states that “to build a reading brain network, we co-opt parts of the brain involved in vision and auditory processing, and language and attention and affect (how we observe emotion).” All four lobes of our brains are engaged when we read a physical book.
Reading print activates our brains so that letters are associated with sounds and meanings. And according to Lisa Cron in Story Genius (Ten Speed Press, 2016), “[i]t’s actually the biological lure,…a chemical reaction [that’s] triggered by the intense curiosity that an effective story always instantly generates.”
How about education and teaching kids to read and how well kids read and what they like to read. Wait. Do they even like to read? My grandkids and their friends do, but that’s a very small and select sample.
As reported by The Guardian, the Department of Education’s most recent survey released in June, 2025. It shows that comprehension among 13-year-olds is lower now than before COVID. It’s easy to blame the pandemic for all our ills, and few studies have been done comparing physical reading and digital reading. The Guardian continues that a “soon-to-be published groundbreaking study” by neuroscientists at Columbia University shows “a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen…”
Dartmouth professor Donna Coch notes that reading for comprehension needs to be automatic. Consciously de-coding words, and trying to glean the meaning of a word from those around it, use up the brain’s bandwidth that a “better reader” will use to compare and synthesize what they’re reading. And it’s harder to do on a screen.
Reading on a devise is passive scrolling. When we scroll, we use our working memory which can hold about seven items at a time. If some of those seven are helping us remember which buttons to click, we’re not invested as deeply in what we are reading as we are when we hold a book and physically turn its pages.
We tend to skim as we scroll. We not only don’t engage our whole brain, we are easily distracted by the ease of switching to an online dictionary and are just a click away from relieving boredom by tapping to open Solitaire or some other game or internet site. Incoming messages and other alerts are also distractions.
Back to YouTube and the BBC, “[t]the power of deep reading is really fundamental to our humanity…And that process of changing the minds and hearts of individuals changes society and allows us to build bigger, more beautiful futures.”
Even after all this research, that I mostly did online, I know I will continue to read on my phone. It’s too convenient. The light stuff, though, the stories I don’t need to remember or report on or talk about.
I’m reading, well actually listening to (a subject for another day) Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale (narrated by Polly Stone, Macmillan Audio, 2025. Originally published by St. Martin’s Press, 2015). It’s a coming of age story set in France during WWII, my first Kristin Hannah. The characters feel very real and the setting is interesting. The plot is easy to follow and engaging. Recommended.
Be curious! (And read, or listen to a book)
. . .
He turned the pages.
He read with gusto.
“Gusto makes everything more exciting,”
Mr. Putter told Tabby.
from Mr. Putter & Tabby Turn the Page
written by Cynthia Rylant
illustrated by Arthur Howard
Houghton Mifflin Horcourt, 2014
Unlike Mr. Putter, even when my cat (Yofi, not Tabby) is as close as my lap, I read silently., only sometimes with gusto.
I read books on my easy-to-hold phone. There’s more room on my lap for Yofi that way. The phone is easy to see, too. With its tiny backlit screen, little pages, and large font, I turn the pages fast, even though I’m a pretty slow reader.
I read on my reading chair in the living room, I read in the car (when someone else is driving), and I read in bed. I can read while I wait till my dental hygienist is ready to clean my teeth, and when I’m enjoying a beautiful spring day on my back porch. E-books are in short, portable.
I also read physical books. Especially when there are pictures: photos in biographies and histories, or illustrations in picture books and those for younger (and older) kids. There’s something comforting about holding a book and turning the actual pages. If I need a light, the lamp shines softly over my right shoulder. It’s easier on my eyes, too.
So, I wondered which format is better, if one indeed is.
Turns out, even though it doesn’t feel active to my couch-potato self, reading a physical book is an active endeavor. For my brain, though, not my body.
Our brains process information differently when we read physical books and when we read digital books. According to Kerry Benson in a 2020 article in BrainFacts.org, we focus our attention on a non-moving object when we read a physical book. She likens reading print material to a kind of meditation. We become immersed in what we are reading.
Anne Mangen, a literacy professor in Norway and Lauren Singer Trakhman of the University of Maryland agree that digital reading is better for scanning headlines or getting to the main idea of a subject. If retention, comprehension, and attention to details is the object, though, stick to a physical book.
Mangen continues, “[digital] reading impairs comprehension particularly for longer, more complex texts…digital media trains our brains to process information more rapidly and less thoroughly.
An early study for the marketing research company Millward Brown gave participants connected to brain scanning equipment advertisements on a screen and ads on a printed card. When they analyzed their data, they found that print materials were more likely to activate the medial prefrontal cortex, the area of the brain that helps us identify with others. Also how we rate ourselves on a self-esteem scale, our evaluation of our own personality traits, and how we process our emotions.
It’s why we identify with the main character in a story we are reading. Is she like me? What would I do in a similar situation? When we identify with the characters, we are building empathy in ourselves.
A YouTube from the BBC World Service, “Why reading isn’t ‘natural,’” states that “to build a reading brain network, we co-opt parts of the brain involved in vision and auditory processing, and language and attention and affect (how we observe emotion).” All four lobes of our brains are engaged when we read a physical book.
Reading print activates our brains so that letters are associated with sounds and meanings. And according to Lisa Cron in Story Genius (Ten Speed Press, 2016), “[i]t’s actually the biological lure,…a chemical reaction [that’s] triggered by the intense curiosity that an effective story always instantly generates.”
How about education and teaching kids to read and how well kids read and what they like to read. Wait. Do they even like to read? My grandkids and their friends do, but that’s a very small and select sample.
As reported by The Guardian, the Department of Education’s most recent survey released in June, 2025. It shows that comprehension among 13-year-olds is lower now than before COVID. It’s easy to blame the pandemic for all our ills, and few studies have been done comparing physical reading and digital reading. The Guardian continues that a “soon-to-be published groundbreaking study” by neuroscientists at Columbia University shows “a clear advantage to reading a text on paper, rather than on a screen…”
Dartmouth professor Donna Coch notes that reading for comprehension needs to be automatic. Consciously de-coding words, and trying to glean the meaning of a word from those around it, use up the brain’s bandwidth that a “better reader” will use to compare and synthesize what they’re reading. And it’s harder to do on a screen.
Reading on a devise is passive scrolling. When we scroll, we use our working memory which can hold about seven items at a time. If some of those seven are helping us remember which buttons to click, we’re not invested as deeply in what we are reading as we are when we hold a book and physically turn its pages.
We tend to skim as we scroll. We not only don’t engage our whole brain, we are easily distracted by the ease of switching to an online dictionary and are just a click away from relieving boredom by tapping to open Solitaire or some other game or internet site. Incoming messages and other alerts are also distractions.
Back to YouTube and the BBC, “[t]the power of deep reading is really fundamental to our humanity…And that process of changing the minds and hearts of individuals changes society and allows us to build bigger, more beautiful futures.”
Even after all this research, that I mostly did online, I know I will continue to read on my phone. It’s too convenient. The light stuff, though, the stories I don’t need to remember or report on or talk about.
I’m reading, well actually listening to (a subject for another day) Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale (narrated by Polly Stone, Macmillan Audio, 2025. Originally published by St. Martin’s Press, 2015). It’s a coming of age story set in France during WWII, my first Kristin Hannah. The characters feel very real and the setting is interesting. The plot is easy to follow and engaging. Recommended.
Be curious! (And read, or listen to a book)
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