How Reading Made Us: 1. How Reading Made Our Brains

Reading seems an unremarkable skill. After all, everyone can read. Even small children. When we say something is as “easy as ABC”, we mean it is very easy indeed. In fact, learning to read has dramatic and irreversible consequences for people and for societies. Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. For centuries people have been reading more and more. Recently the trend has gone into reverse. The number of people who pick up a book has been falling steadily for twenty years. Now half of adults no longer read regularly. How will this change us? Over three episodes, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading made us, and what might happen if we stop. In this first programme, James finds out how unnatural the process of reading is, and the complex alchemy our brains create to make words on the page make sense to us, and asks what we gain - and lose - when we learn to read. Guests include: - Professor Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA - John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times - Naomi Alderman, writer and presenter - Dr Joseph Henrich, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard University Producer - Beth Sagar-Fenton Editor - Chris Ledgard

You can listen to How Reading Made Us: 1. How Reading Made Our Brains online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

How Reading Made Us: 1. How Reading Made Our Brains is an episode from Understand: The Economy by BBC.

This episode is 41:45 long.

This episode was published on Mar 16, 2026.

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