Study: Reading as a child may have enhanced your brain activity!

Were you big into reading as a child or is it something you’ve picked up only more recently? Maybe you’ve only just rediscovered a love of books after a childhood love of them faded away in your teenage years.

But more importantly – did your parents read to you as a child?

A study seems to suggest that if your parents read aloud to you in your early years, you may have had a significant advantage in terms of your cognitive development.

We all know that reading is great for developing literacy, having a good vocabulary and even nurturing a vivid imagination – but being read aloud to may have actually increased your brain power!

The Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research found that children who were frequently read to  at a young age thrived in school, regardless of their family background or home environment and that language, numeracy and cognition were all significantly positively impacted by being read to every day. They also found that reading to children  6-7 days per week when they’re between the ages 4-5 had the same effect in terms of their cognitive ability as being 12 months older than peers who were not read to – which is pretty crazy stuff!

The way it works, according to Melbourne Child Psychology School, is that when we’re read to at a young age, our brains do something called ‘brain-imaging’. The brain’s activity goes up because we’re imagining and interpreting at the same time. So when young children hear ‘The duck jumped into the pond’, they’re putting together the images – ‘I know what a duck looks like and I know what a pond looks like. How do I put them together?’ The areas of the brain associated with visual processing have to work harder, especially if they’re not looking at a picture book.

Activating the imagination like this without the visual stimulation of picture books means that children move onto independent reading of non-picture books themselves more quickly also. The language benefits alone are huge, as some researchers in Ohio State suggest that children who are read to may have heard as many as a million words more than their peers by kindergarten.

So were you a childhood reader or not? Do you remember your parents reading to you and are you a prodigy because of it? Might be time to send them a thank you note!