I have a weakness for books – physical books, not any form of e-books. I don’t have a huge library, but I have small shelves of personal book treasures, books I have read and will read again, books I like to curl up with on a rainy day or to pull out for inspiration and contemplation. I know my books; their pages are dog-eared, portions of texts are underlined, circled and cross-referenced with other pages. I even know the smell of each book, which for me, is part of the allure of owning physical books.

I may be an oddity in this screen and scrolling age, but from what I understand, many people are rediscovering the joy of reading physical books. It is a joy they first experienced as a child which was then lost to technology. We may not be conscious of it, but holding, touching and reading physical books connect us back to our humanity, to our need to touch something to feel that it exists.

THE SCIENCE OF PRINT

Not all technological progress is superior. Enlightened writers like Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) have warned us about that well before the Internet era. In his classic dystopian book, Brave New World, Huxley imagined a technologically driven, hedonistic, and totalitarian society that suppresses individuality for stability. People in this society lived shallowly, spurning traditional ways of life as backward. Sounds familiar?

Huxley might have described the defining feature of our modern world, in which technology and efficiency are worshipped, often at the expense of mental health. We feel burned out, constantly on the screen, constantly scrolling. We feel overloaded with information that is largely ephemeral. We become “the shallows” – to borrow the lead title of Nicholas Carr’s 2010 book, “The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains.”

Carr argues that internet technology is physically rewiring our brains, reducing our capacity for deep concentration, contemplation, and creative thinking. He posits that constant digital multitasking and rapid information scanning (the “shallow” approach) foster quick, distracted thinking over deep, analytical thought. The book was a 2011 Pulitzer Prize finalist and in its updated editions, Carr argues that the rise of smartphones and social media has only intensified these effects.

What then is the antidote to this digital numbing effect? You guessed it – a return to loving physical books of substance and a habit of slow, focused reading. Science shows that print activates more regions of the brain than screens, especially areas linked to deep comprehension and information retention. A 2024 meta-analysis of print versus digital reading yields the following key findings:

Comprehension
The study found that reading on paper yields higher comprehension rates than screen reading because digital reading inhibits long-term recall.

Mental Mapping
Physical books provide spatial and physical feedback. Put simply, you can turn pages and feel the book’s weight. You can make cross references by making annotations that connect ideas from different pages. You can underline or mark certain words, turns of phrases or whole paragraphs that resonate with you on a page. The spatial memory that reading physical books facilitate allows your brain to form a mental map of information that may be scattered all over. Such mental maps enhance understanding and processing of the information within the text.

Cognitive Focus

Screen reading often involves scrolling, which can hinder the ability to form a cohesive, mental picture of a text. Scrolling and flitting from page to page simply distracts focus by draining our limited cognitive resources. Additionally, while devices are great for multitasking, our brains are not wired to perform multiple tasks well at the same time.

BACK TO BASICS

For years, we’ve been told that the future is digital, that physical books will become dinosaurs. That didn’t pan out. Millions of people still reach for a physical book. It’s not out of nostalgia, nor stubbornness. As the above findings show, our instinct was backed by science the whole time.

Further Study

Ferris Jabr, “The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens”, Scientific American, April 11, 2013.