Study Says Printed Books Help the Brain Track Stories Better Than Screens

A new study published in PLOS ONE suggests that reading on paper gives the brain an advantage over digital reading when it comes to organizing and remembering a story. Researchers from the University of Tokyo said screen reading offers fewer physical cues, while printed pages provide spatial and sensory signals, such as page thickness and where events appear on the page, that help readers build a fuller narrative map.

The team used Japanese manga to examine how people form a “story schema,” the mental framework that links characters, timelines, and relationships. The study was done with a Japanese publishing company. Prof. Kuniiyoshi Sakae of the University of Tokyo said the team was “completely surprised” by the results.

Researchers recruited 25 right-handed students to reduce variation in brain organization. Because digital devices interfere with MRI scanning, participants read the first half of the story either on paper or on a tablet, then entered the scanner and read the second half through special glasses. Afterward, they answered questions about the plot, including questions that required connecting information from both halves.

Both groups scored well overall, but those who read the first part on a tablet took longer to answer the more complex questions. Brain scans showed lower activity in the left and right hemispheres among readers who used paper, especially in areas tied to language processing and narrative integration, which the researchers interpreted as the brain working more efficiently. Tablet readers showed higher activity in those same regions, as well as in areas linked to harder cognitive tasks and spatial processing, suggesting they needed more mental effort to reconstruct the story. Sakae said this was the first study to show such an immediate effect of paper reading on brain activity. He argued the findings would likely be similar for novels or other standard texts, not just manga. The article also noted a 2019 study from the University of Michigan that found parents and children built stronger interactions when they read real books together than when they used screens.