How reading turns you into a real superhuman [Infographic]

Do books make you feel warm and fuzzy inside? Are you the type of person who would rather stay coddled with a great book instead of doing literally anything else?

Congratulations, you’re a book nerd just like us! There’s no greater feeling than turning a page knowing that you’re either learning or experiencing something new. Sometimes it feels as though nothing can ever beat the experience of being alone with a great book.

The best thing about reading, however, is that the benefits don’t stop at mere enjoyment.

Research shows that reading makes you smarter by giving you a better vocabulary, advanced word knowledge, and abstract reasoning. Readers of fiction are also more empathetic and have greater emotional intelligence. There are some amazing health benefits to reading, too, including helping with low mood, cutting stress, and improving cognitive abilities. 

Check out all the ways you become (almost) superhuman through reading in the infographic below.

What reading actually does to your brain and body

The infographic above sums it up at a glance, but here’s a closer look at what the research suggests — and why reading earns its “superhuman” reputation.

A sharper, more capable brain

Regular reading builds your vocabulary, deepens your store of knowledge, and strengthens the pattern-recognition and abstract reasoning your brain relies on every day. Brain-imaging research from Emory University (Berns et al., 2013) found that reading a novel produced measurable changes in brain connectivity that lingered for days after the reading stopped. Keeping the mind active this way is also associated with slower cognitive decline as we age.

More empathy and stronger social instincts

Fiction does something non-fiction often can’t: it puts you inside another person’s head. A 2013 study in Science by Kidd and Castano proposed that reading literary fiction can sharpen “theory of mind” — our ability to read others’ mental states — though subsequent replication attempts have produced mixed results. The longer-term evidence is stronger: committed fiction readers consistently score higher on empathy measures, suggesting the benefit builds over time rather than from a single session.

Better health and resilience

Staying mentally active through reading is one of the most consistently supported ways to protect cognitive function as you age. A large longitudinal study published in Neurology, found that people who engaged in cognitively stimulating activities including reading throughout their lives experienced cognitive decline roughly 32% more slowly than those who did not — a finding that held even after accounting for other health factors.

There is also clinical evidence that structured reading — a therapeutic approach known as bibliotherapy — can reduce symptoms of low mood in adults, with Level 1 evidence from randomised controlled trials. The broader wellbeing effect of absorbed reading is harder to quantify precisely, but the mechanism is intuitive: sustained focus on a book shifts attention away from ruminative thinking and lowers physiological arousal in ways consistent with other relaxation practices.

A boost to your creativity

Every book you read is exposure — to new genres, styles, structures, and ideas. The more widely you read, the bigger the well you can draw on in your own writing, whether that’s a novel, a blog post, or an email. Reading great writers remains one of the most reliable ways to become a better one yourself.

Print or screen?

If you want the most relaxing read, paper still has the edge: a printed page puts no glare or notifications between you and the story. For winding down — especially before sleep — an old-fashioned printed book is hard to beat.

Final thoughts

Most habits ask you to choose: exercise your body or rest it, stimulate your mind or quiet it. Reading is unusual in that it does several things at once — builds vocabulary and abstract reasoning, develops empathy, supports mood, and slows cognitive decline — without feeling like work. The evidence for these benefits runs from randomised controlled trials to decades-long longitudinal studies, and it points in the same direction: the people who read regularly, over years and across a lifetime, end up measurably different from those who don’t.

None of this requires a cape. It requires a book and the intention to open it.

Editor’s note: This article was originally written by Rachael Lui and has been updated by the GEE editorial team in June 2026 for clarity and accuracy.