You might set out to wash dishes and decide you might as well listen to your audiobook in the meantime, but when you read, even if you’re also, say, listening to music, reading is “really primary task,” David Rapp, a professor of psychology at Northwestern University, tells Mic.ĭifferent mediums might also be better-suited to different genres.
“Listening can be much more passive,” which is readily apparent by how much easier it is to multitask when tuning in to an audiobook. But generally speaking, reading does require more active engagement than listening. According to one hypothesis, “things are more memorable when you have to work a little bit in order to process the stimulus,” he says. “If you want to build long-term memory and increase comprehension, it’s all about effort,” she says. In other words, her research suggests that at least when it comes to consuming material in a relatively passive manner, it doesn’t really matter whether you read or listen to the book. Rogowsky and colleagues saw no significant differences in the scores among the three groups.īut Rogowsky notes that her study looked only at the comprehension that resulted when people read and/or listened to the material one time through, not when they tried to study it at a deep level.
The volunteers then took a comprehension test. One listened to excerpts of a nonfiction book about World War II another read the excerpts from an e-reader and a third read and listened to the excerpts simultaneously. Her team randomly assigned adult volunteers to three groups. But does one facilitate greater comprehension than the other? Beth Rogowsky, an associate professor of education at Bloomsburg University, sought to investigate this inquiry in a recent study. Reading and listening to a book may engage different brain pathways, he tells Mic, but most psycholinguists (they study language the psychological and neurobiological aspects that allow humans to process language) agree that the “mental machinery” involved in the higher-level understanding of a narrative, plot, and so on, is the same regardless of how you consume the book.įrom a neurological perspective, then, reading and listening to a book have quite a bit of overlap. Listening to an audiobook activates the brain network specialized for auditory processing, while reading a printed book activates the network involved in visual processing, explains Matthew Traxler, a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. After reading printed books for so long, I worry that listening to audiobooks would feel way outside my comfort zone.īut is listening to books really all that different from reading them? In other words, do audiobooks “count” as reading? Experts say there’s no clear-cut answer, but you might consider opting for one medium over the other depending on what and why you’re reading, as well as your own personal preferences. Despite their popularity, though, I’ve just never felt compelled to go that direction.
They swear by audio books, listening to them in the interstitial spaces of life - while driving or folding laundry, for instance - something they just can’t do with print or e-books.Īudio books have ranked as the fastest-growing book format since 2013, per the Association of American Publishers. But some members, who have equally busy lives, manage to finish every book on time. I often attend my beer and book club without quite having finished the month’s selection, or end up powering through the weekend before. Like many adults these days, I struggle to find time to really immerse myself in a book.
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