Your reading mind: how books can boost the brain and the heart. From the article:

Book reading … is on the decline and has been for decades.

Back in 1978, just 8% of Americans said they had not read a book during the previous year, according to a Gallup poll. Last year, that figure had jumped to 24% — and that included listening to audiobooks — according to a Pew Research Center survey.

Experts say the abandonment of book reading may have some unappealing consequences for cognition. “People are clearly reading fewer books now than they used to, and that has to have a cost because we know book reading is very good cognitive exercise,” says Ken Pugh, director of research at the Yale-affiliated Haskins Laboratories, which examines the importance of spoken and written language.

Pugh says the process of reading a book involves “a highly variable set of skills that are deep and complex” and that activate all of the brain’s major domains. “Language, selective attention, sustained attention, cognition, and imagination — there’s no question reading is going to strengthen all those,” he says. In particular, reading novels and works of narrative non-fiction — basically, books that tell a story — train a reader’s imagination and aspects of cognition that other forms of reading mostly neglect, he says….

Along with strengthening your brain, there’s evidence that book reading may help you connect with friends and loved ones. “Many have theorized that reading fiction improves social skills because fiction often focuses on interpersonal relationships,” says Maria Eugenia Panero, a research associate at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence.

Panero highlights a 2013 study that found reading passages of highbrow “literary” fiction — as opposed to non-fiction or popular fiction — led to improvements on tests that measured readers’ theory of mind. “Theory of mind is defined as the ability to recognize the internal states of others — their thoughts, beliefs, intentions, emotions, etc.,” she says….

Other experts say there’s evidence that reading traditional books — the kind that are bound and printed on paper — may offer benefits not associated with e-readers or audiobooks. “We’ve found that reading from screens tends to be less efficient — meaning it takes longer,” says David Daniel, a professor of psychology at James Madison University….

Other studies have found that readers comprehend long sections of text less fully when reading on a screen instead of on paper. Still more research has found paper reading also beats screen reading when it comes to student comprehension scores. “I think reading from screens somehow changes the reading experience,” Daniel says.

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