What reading does for the mind

Reading makes you smarter, and the more reading you do, the better. Reading beats any other form of knowledge transfer in developing cognitive abilities. Reading:

• increases vocabulary more than talking, listening or direct teaching;
• substantially boosts general knowledge while decreasing the likelihood that misinformation will be absorbed; and
• helps keep our memory and reasoning abilities intact as we age.

These claims are suppported with experimental facts in a paper titled What Reading Does for the Mind by Anne E. Cunningham (associate professor of Cognition and Development at the University of California, Berkeley) and Keith E. Stanovich (Professor of Human Development and Applied Psychology, University of Toronto), published in American Educator, Spring/Summer 1998. http://www.aft.org/pubs-reports/american_educator/spring_sum98/index.html