Reading and Writing as Dementia Defense

The headline in The Guardian stopped me cold:

“Reading and writing can lower dementia risk by almost 40%, study finds.”

Now, we don’t need much inducement to do either of those around here. And heck, I’ve already written an entire book about the benefits of reading. You can get a summary of the six benefits I covered in the book, with a bonus seventh in my post Reaping the Seventh Reward: Shared Immortality.

I think I may have to get started on a new edition, because reading that Guardian article sent me down a rabbit hole. I’ve collected a handful of research articles with new findings since publishing Read ‘Em & Reap in 2019. But I found a lot more and thought I’d share the highlights now, in case I don’t get around to that new book until, say, a tenth anniversary edition!

Lowering Dementia Risk

The headline study above was published online this week in the journal Neurology (free summary) and examined older adults with various levels of “lifetime cognitive enrichment” which the author told The Guardian meant:

• “Early enrichment, before 18, included the frequency of being read to and reading books, access to newspapers and atlases in the home, and learning a foreign language for more than five years.
• “Middle-age enrichment included income level at 40, household resources such as magazine subscriptions, dictionaries and library cards and the frequency of activities such as visiting a museum or library.
• “Later-life enrichment, starting at an average age of 80, included the frequency of reading, writing, and playing games and total income from social security, retirement and other sources.”

Comparing those in the upper 10% of lifetime cognitive enrichment with those in the lowest 10%, the study found the upper 10% group had “a 38% lower risk of Alzheimer’s disease and a 36% lower risk of MCI (mild cognitive impairment) than the lowest group.

And that’s not all. Among the participants who did develop Alzheimer’s, those with the highest lifetime cognitive enrichment did so at an average age of 94. The lowest group did so at 88. Thus, high levels of lifetime cognitive enrichment was associated with a more than 5-year delay in showing the disease.

You’ll note that it’s not just reading. The Guardian article emphasized “reading, writing, and learning a language” as tops among the “intellectually stimulating activities” that the researchers focused on. I’ll go out on a limb and say that writing — if you care about doing it well — is about as intellectually stimulated as you can get. And it requires learning a language (even your native tongue), more and more deeply.

Look again at the third bullet above, the one about those “starting at an average age of 80.” That’s the group that specifically mentions writing as one of the protective activities.

We have a client, Andrew Segal, in his 80s, currently working on Book 5 in his award winning, best selling Tammy Pierre murder mystery series. And a good friend, James Flaherty, 90, who’s writing another book and working on a screenplay!

As further inspiration, here’s a quote from this week’s Modern Elder Academy newsletter, in which CEO Derek Gehl talks about the attitude behind MEA and his own book, A Study of One: The Longevity Manifesto (free download):

“Aging isn’t a disease. It’s a passage. The second half of life isn’t about clinging to 35. It’s about becoming something you couldn’t have been at 35. A Modern Elder. Someone whose lived experience actually means something. Someone who’s still growing.

“We’re not anti-aging. We’re pro-aging. And that changes everything about how we approach longevity.”

But regardless of your current age, as a defense for when you get to that elder group, I’ll repeat my favorite quote from Faulkner:

“Read, read, read. … Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write.”

Your brain will thank you for it.

A Few More Bits of Recent Reading Research

I’ll share some more of my rabbit hole results, the good, bad, and ugly.

Unlocking the Power of Reading: How Building Strong Reading Habits Can Transform Your Life, Bindhu, A., et al. (May 2025). The researchers found that regular reading and reading for pleasure supported both practical skills (memory, critical thinking, problem-solving) and emotional well-being (stress reduction, emotional intelligence, empathy).

Comparing those who read daily against those who reported reading rarely or never, they reported the contrast between those groups as follows:

Cognitive Benefits

• Memory Improvement: Daily – 85% vs. Rarely/Never – 20%
• Critical Thinking Enhancement: Daily – 80% vs. Rarely/Never – 18%
• Problem-Solving Ability: 78% vs. Rarely/Never – 15%

Emotional Health

• Stress Reduction: Daily – 70% vs. Rarely/Never – 15%
• Emotional Intelligence: Daily – 72% vs. Rarely/Never – 18%
• Empathy Increase: Daily – 75% vs. Rarely/Never – 20%

The Paper Advantage: Why Reading Print Is Better for Your Brain, Kube, E. (March 2025). This article reviews a number of studies, some that I covered in my book, but two more recent studies caught my eye as supporting the claim in his title. One 2022 study looked at the relationship between having books in the home and academic achievement, finding a significant relationship effect: more books, more success.

But in a stunningly simple statement, the authors wrote: “No such effect emerged for the number of ebooks.”

Another study, also from 2022, use eye-tracking to assess how readers interacted with print vs. digital texts. The print readers tended to pause and go back and re-read difficult passages, while the screen readers would “skip between sections more frequently and engage in surface-level scanning rather than deep analysis.”

Then, they were tested for comprehension:

“Despite spending equal time with the material, print readers scored 24 percent higher in their understanding of the content.”

The author explained that reading physical books leads to “embodied reading.”

“The tactile experience of holding a book, feeling its weight, and turning pages supports spatial memory and helps readers create a mental map of the text, aiding comprehension and recall.”

The decline in reading for pleasure over 20 years of the American Time Use Survey, Bone, J., et al. (September 2025). This one is depressing, showing a decline from 28% in 2003 to 16% in 2023, though like others that have reported a decline in reading, it flies in the face of continuing modest growth in book sales (e.g., Print Book Sales Rose Slightly in 2025, Publishers Weekly, Jan. 9, 2026).

The decline in reading study uses a large database, the American Time Use Survey, but that source has an odd wrinkle, acknowledged as a weakness by the authors. It asks participants to report how they spent their time on a single day, the day before they took the survey. For reading, this seems an especially poor way to gather information purportedly about a habit that may vary widely from weekdays to weekends, to holidays, to vacations.

One bright spot showed that among those who do read, the time spent on reading rose from 1 hr 22 mins per day to 1 hr 39 mins per day.

The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, Rose Horowitz (November 2024). This is the ugly one. According to a professor at Columbia, many college students are unable to focus enough to read a book. He says many have never been assigned a whole book to read in high school, concluding:

“It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.”

I can’t even. Then again, where are their parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents. The love of reading needs to be instilled in childhood. As I wrote in Read ‘Em & Reap,

“These deep reading circuits are not genetically wired into our brains. Not nearly enough time has passed for natural selection to achieve that. Humans reading long form text has been widespread only since the invention of the printing press, combined with the growth of institutionalized education, in the last 200 years or so. Thus,

“‘The reality is that each new reader — that is, each child — must build a wholly new reading circuit.'”

That last line comes from Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf (2018), which I highly recommend, along with Thirty Million Words: Building a Child’s Brain, Dana Suskind (2015), for understanding the vital importance of reading in the lives and longevity of our kids.

Regardless of their current chronological ages.