Meghan Cox Gurdon - The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction

THE TIME WE spend reading aloud is like no other time. A miraculous alchemy takes place when one person reads to another, one that converts the ordinary stuff of lifea book, a voice, a place to sit, and a bit of timeinto astonishing fuel for the heart, the mind, and the imagination.

We let down our guard when someone we love is reading us a story, the novelist Kate DiCamillo once told me. We exist together in a little patch of warmth and light.

Shes right about that, and explorations in brain and behavioral science are beginning to yield thrilling insights into why. Its no coincidence that these discoveries are coming during a paradigm shift in the way we live. The technology that allows us to observe the inner workings of the human brain is of a piece with the same technology that baffles and addles and seems to be reshaping the brain. In a culture undergoing whats been called the big disconnect, many of us are grappling with the effects of screens and devices, machines that enhance our lives and at the same time make it harder to concentrate and to retain what weve seen and read, and alarmingly easy to be only half present even with the people we love most. In this distracted age, we need to change our understanding of what reading aloud is, and what it can do. It is not just a simple, cozy, nostalgic pastime that can be taken up or dropped without consequence. It needs to be recognized as the dazzlingly transformative and even countercultural act that it is.

For babies and small children, with their fast-growing brains, there is simply nothing else like it. For that reason, Ive devoted a substantial proportion of this book to the young. They respond in the most immediately consequential ways when someone reads to them, and as a result they are the subject of most research on the topic. As we shall see, listening to stories while looking at pictures stimulates childrens deep brain networks, fostering their optimal cognitive development. Further, the companionable experience of shared reading cultivates empathy, dramatically accelerates young childrens language acquisition, and vaults them ahead of their peers when they get to school. The rewards of early reading are astonishingly meaningful: toddlers who have lots of stories read to them turn into children who are more likely to enjoy strong relationships, sharper focus, and greater emotional resilience and self-mastery. The evidence has become so overwhelming that social scientists now consider read-aloud time one of the most important indicators of a childs prospects in life.