The Half-Hour That Buys You Months

Here is a strange thing to know about books. People who read them tend to live longer.

A team at Yale followed 3,635 people over the age of 50. They watched them for up to twelve years. The book readers were about a fifth less likely to die in that time.

The amount needed was small. Just half an hour a day was enough to matter. At one point in the numbers, book readers had gained roughly 23 extra months of life over the people who didn't read.

As little as half an hour a day of reading came with a real survival advantage.

Newspapers and magazines did not do the same thing. Books did. The researchers thought it was because a book asks more of you. You hold characters in your head. You follow a plot. You keep making connections.

I want to be careful here. This is one study, and it shows a link, not a cause. Healthier, wealthier people do more of everything, reading included. But the odd part is that the link held even after the researchers accounted for all of that.

There is a second reason books might matter, and it is quieter. Some researchers think stories build a real skill — the skill of understanding what is going on inside another person. There is a name for this. It is called theory of mind — the ability to guess what someone else is thinking or feeling.

In one experiment, people who read a short piece of literary fiction did better afterward on a test of reading emotions in others' eyes. Popular fiction and nonfiction did not help the same way.

I find myself wanting to trust that finding a little less, and I like that I have to. When other scientists tried to repeat it, the results were mixed. Some got the effect. Some didn't. That honesty is part of the story. A single reading session is not going to rewire you. But the idea underneath — that living inside other minds on the page might help you read the ones around you — feels true to anyone who reads.

So reading pours other people's minds into yours. That is one direction. The next chapter goes the other way.

References

Bavishi, A., Slade, M. D., & Levy, B. R. (2016). A chapter a day: Association of book reading with longevity. Social Science & Medicine, 164, 44–48.

Kidd, D. C., & Castano, E. (2013). Reading literary fiction improves theory of mind. Science, 342(6156), 377–380.

Kidd, D., & Castano, E. (2019). Reading literary fiction and theory of mind: Three preregistered replications and extensions of Kidd and Castano (2013). Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(4), 522–531.