Parents, we report, are being urged to read to their children over the summer holidays, or ensure the kids keep reading, to maintain their mental development. The brain is a muscle like any other, it needs to be flexed and stretched regularly or it will atrophy.
On Friday the NZ Herald carried a Washington Post report of a study that followed more than 3000 people aged 18-30 for 25 years, giving them a questionnaire every five years. They found that young adults who watched a lot of television and did little physical activity had worse cognitive function as they came into middle age. Not only were they slower to absorb information but their "executive function" - the ability to manage time and keep track of things, for example - was not as good. And no, they were not all men. The sample had an even gender balance.
This is probably no surprise where television is concerned. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan postulated long ago that watching TV summoned less activity by the mind than reading words on paper or listening to a radio. These cause the mind to make its own pictures, and we usually discover how much more vivid those are when we see a movie someone has tried to make of a book.
But television is not the worry for parents today. Children are looking at different screens and older children are reading screens. There is no reason to think words on a tablet or smartphone require any less mental activity than reading a book. But it would be good to be sure.
Whether the material is text messages or social media feeds, people are reading now more than probably ever in human history. People read as they walk along the street, they are reading in restaurants, reading when they meet in coffee bars, reading even when they are face-to-face. It is not pictures that usually demand our attention at those times, it is words.
