Audiobooks or Reading? To Our Brains, It Doesn’t Matter

Stories stimulate the brain in the same way, regardless of whether they're read or heard.

By Jennifer Walter
Aug 22, 2019 12:51 PMMay 17, 2020 10:34 PM
Reading-Listening-Brain-Maps
These color-coded maps of the brain show the semantic similarities during listening (top) and reading (bottom). (Credit: Fatma Deniz)

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If you don’t have time to sit and read a physical book, is listening to the audio version considered cheating? To some hardcore book nerds, it could be. But new evidence suggests that, to our brains, reading and hearing a story might not be so different.

In a study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, researchers from the Gallant Lab at UC Berkeley scanned the brains of nine participants while they read and listened to a series of tales from “The Moth Radio Hour.” After analyzing how each word was processed in the the brain’s cortex, they created maps of the participants’ brains, noting the different areas helped interpret the meaning of each word.

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