I love audiobooks and consume them frequently but I personally don’t call it reading. It doesn’t feel like the same activity to me. What do you think?
I love audiobooks and consume them frequently but I personally don’t call it reading. It doesn’t feel like the same activity to me. What do you think?
I’ve seen people listen to audiobooks. When I ask them, they can’t even tell me what happened in the last 5 minutes. So it cannot be disproven entirely, because I’ve seen it happen multiple times. What studies are you referring to?
I’ve seen people read books. When I ask them, they can’t even tell me what happened in the last 5 minutes, and in some cases, can’t recall a single significant detail of what they read throughout the entire book. So from an unverified anecdotal standpoint I think it’s a wash.
However there have been dozens of studies on this topic over the last 70 years. One of the more significant recent studies was This one where they looked at brain scans of people reading and listening to audiobooks and found that the brain activity between the two different kinds of readers was the same, down to the specific region of the brain.
The most comprehensive meta-analysis of these studies found that there was no reliable difference in comprehension or retention between the modes of reading, which proves both our anecdotes are just statistical outliers and not indicative of any real innate difference.