Reading is an acquired set of skills that literally changes the brain.

Everyone should be reading books. This is it.

Books are life experience, books are knowledge.

Books are community.

Without books, we wouldn't be human in the way that we are.

Literacy is one of the greatest inventions of the human species.

First fire, then reading, I'd say.

Reading is the blink of the eye in our evolutionary clock.

It's only six thousand years old, and it began in such a simple way

to mark how many wine vessels or sheep we had.

And with the birth of alphabetic systems,

we began to have an efficient means of remembering,

and storing knowledge.

What reading does is exploit a principle of design

in the human brain, that allows it to make new connections

between visual regions, language regions,

regions for thought and emotion.

It begins actually afresh in every new reader.

It doesn't exist inside our head.

Each person who has to learn to read,

has to create a brand new circuit in their brain.

Reading a great story is so much more than entertainment.

Reading actually has many therapeutic benefits.

Bibliotherapy is the art of prescribing fiction

to cure life's ailments.

Claustrophobia, rage, exhaustion and the cure is Zorba The Greek.

Reading brings three magical powers -

creativity, intelligence and empathy.

Reading for the joy of it is one of the two key factors

in a kids later economic success.

You're more likely to not be in prison,

to vote, to own your own home.

All of these advantages and benefits happen as a result of literacy.

Your brain goes into a meditative state.

A physical process which slows your heartbeat and calms you down,

and reduces anxiety.

When we read at a surface level, we're just getting the information.

When we read deeply, we're using much more of our cerebral cortex.

Deep reading means that we make analogies, we make inferences,

which allows us to be truly critical, analytic, empathic, human beings.

We think of the book as the work,

but the book is just a delivery mechanism.

The novel is evolving.

There's all sorts of amazing books which are being written deliberately

to be read on phones.

These kind of new mediums, they are giving a voice

to a new generation of writers,

who don't have to kind of get through a bottleneck.

Stops us from having this kind of conditioning

as to what is 'good writing'

and it actually allows people just to talk and share stories

and to share experiences.

It doesn't matter the medium, it doesn't matter how you get it,

it's a story.

And the book maybe provides this illusion that this is it.

It's never been it, it's a way into a thought process.

We brought together scholars and scientists from over 30 countries,

to do research about the impact of digitisation on reading.

We found that there is, what they call, a screen inferiority.

There is a lot that can be equally well read on your smartphone,

shorter news updates, but with something

that is cognitively or emotionally challenging.

Reading on a screen leads to poorer reading comprehension

than reading on paper.

The reality is, it's not what or how much we read

but how we read, that's really important.

The very volume is having negative effects because to absorb that much,

there's a propensity towards skimming.

The reading brain has a plastic circuitry.

The circuit will reflect the characteristics

of the medium with which it reads.

The characteristics of the digital

are going to be reflected in the circuit.

If we don't train those capacities, we may eventually lose

the ability to understand more complex content,

and also perhaps to engage and to imagine.

The human imagination is a fantastic thing - we're very flexible.

We find ways of doing what we want with the technology we've got.

I think we'll see a lot more short story connections,

and I think we'll see a lot more shorter books.

I've changed the way that I write

because children's attention span has got shorter.

The chapters are short, it's incredibly visual.

Look, shiny like a sweet.

Just and people can be bi and trilingual,

my hope is that we will be developing a biliterate brain.

We can discipline ourselves to choose the medium

that is best suited for what we're reading

so that we don't lose the extraordinary gift

that reading has given our species.

So, what would happen if we stopped reading books?

We'd die.

We'd die. We'd be so boring.