Reading improves your intelligence

 Most popular Can reading make you
smarter? There is evidence that reading can increase
levels of all three major categories of
intelligence. I believe my discovery of Spider-
Man and other comic books turned me into a
straight-A student Thursday 23 January 2014
07.03 EST Brain power Photograph: Saul Gravy/Ikon Images/ Corbis Dan Hurley When I was eight years old, I still couldn't read.
I remember my teacher Mrs Browning walking
over to my desk and asking me to read a few
sentences from a Dick and Jane book. She
pointed to a word. "Tuh-hee," I said, trying to
pronounce it. "The," she said, correcting me, and that's when it clicked – the moment when I
learned to read the word "the". Growing up in Teaneck, New Jersey, in the 1960s, I was what Mrs Browning called "slow".
During a parent-teacher meeting, she told my
mother: "Daniel is a slow learner." I sat during
lunch in the gymnasium with the – forgive the
term – dumb kids. I was grouped with them
during reading and maths: the "slow group". And then, a year later, I was rescued by Spider-Man. My best friend Dan, who was reading chapter books by kindergarten, had
started reading Spider-Man and other comics with some other kid, and together they began
drawing and writing their own comics. In
response to this loathsome intruder's
kidnapping of my best friend, I began reading
comics, too, and then began scrawling and
scribbling my own. Soon, Dan and I were happily spending every afternoon on our masterworks,
while the interloper was never heard from again.
We even convinced Dan's father, Dr. Feigelson
(rest his soul), to film a Super-8 movie that we
scripted: "Bob Cat and Bat v Disappearo!" By age 11, I was getting straight As. Later in my teens, I took a college admissions course
in the US, and scored the equivalent of 136 on an
IQ test. So what happened? Was Mrs Browning
right – was I actually "slow" when I was eight –
and did I somehow become smarter because I
immersed myself in reading and writing comic books? In part to answer that question, I spent three years interviewing psychologists and
neuroscientists around the world, reviewing
their studies and testing new methods they claim
can increase intelligence. Bookworms, after all,
rarely emerge from their literary cocoons in
order to become social butterflies. And while nobody would ever call reading a "new" method
for improving the mind, recent scientific studies
have confirmed that reading and intelligence
have a relationship so close as to be symbiotic. That goes for all three meanings of the word "intelligence" widely recognised by
psychologists. First, there is "crystallised
intelligence" – the potpourri of knowledge that
fills your brain. When you learn how to ride
a bicycle, or the name of a new friend, you are
gaining not just information but potentially useful knowledge that, in aggregate, forms the
backbone of your ability to navigate and thrive
in the world. By adding to that storehouse,
reading increases your crystallised intelligence.
That explains why some IQ tests include
vocabulary words, which generally serve as a reliable proxy of how clever you are. But all of us know people with little "book knowledge" who are nonetheless sharp and
insightful. "Fluid intelligence" is that ability to
solve problems, understand things and detect
meaningful patterns. Of course, you can read
little or nothing at all and still be brilliant at
"reading between the lines" of a conversation. But in today's world, fluid intelligence and
reading also go hand in hand. In fact, the
increased emphasis on critical reading and
writing skills in schools may partly explain why
students perform, on average, about 20 points
higher on IQ tests than in the early 20th century. The so-called Flynn effect is named after James Flynn, a New Zealand professor who has I much of his career to studying the worldwide
phenomena of increasing IQ scores. But if
reading can increase fluid intelligence, the
converse is also true: increased fluid intelligence
also improves reading comprehension,
according to studies by Jason Chein of Temple University in Philadelphia. He used "working
memory" tasks that train people's ability to
juggle and continually update multiple items of
attention – to keep track of a moving dot, for
instance, and recognise when it lands on a spot
it occupied two, three or more moves ago. In papers published in scientific journals in
2010 and 2011, he showed that as both younger
and older adults improved their performance on
working-memory tasks, they were better able to
comprehend reading materials. A third type of intelligence has gained widespread interest of late: "emotional
intelligence", the ability to accurately read and
respond to your own and others' feelings. It may
seem odd to imagine that reading can improve
your emotional intelligence. But in October, the
journal Science published an extraordinary study showing that reading literary fiction can
improve people's theory of mind (ToM) – their ability to understand others' mental states. David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, both of the New School for Social Research in New
York, enlisted hundreds of participants online to
read examples of either non-fiction, popular
fiction or literary fiction, and then to take tests
measuring the accuracy of their ToM. In five
experiments, they showed that reading literary fiction led to better performance on tests of
both emotional and cognitive ToM compared
with reading non-fiction, popular fiction or
nothing at all. The literary fiction found to increase people's ToM included A Chameleon by Anton Chekhov, The Runner by Don DeLillo, and The Tiger's Wife by Téa Obreht. The study did, however, contain a glaring omission: it failed to
measure the extraordinary impact of Spider- Man by that great literary genius, Stan Lee.r