via Ian O’Byrne
Audiobooks or Reading? To Our Brains, It Doesn’t Matter
The most recent study, which compared brains when they were listening and reading, showed that words tend to activate the same brain regions with the same intensity, regardless of input.
It was a finding that surprised Fatma Deniz, a postdoctoral researcher at the Gallant Lab and lead author of the study. The subject’s brains were creating meaning from the words in the same way, regardless if they were listening or reading. In fact, the brain maps for both auditory and visual input they created from the data looked nearly identical.
Jennifer Walter finds that listening to a book is just as productive as reading a book. I wonder if what matters more is the context of reading or listening more than the mode itself? Stephen Downes suggests that much of the finding in this report are left to interpretation.