You may have heard your parents and teachers tell you to do one thing: read. Many children are required to read a certain amount of minutes or a certain amount of pages every day as a homework assignment. The explanation for this is that reading makes you smarter. What is true though? Does reading actually make you smarter?

There are two different types of people: People who love reading, and people who loathe it. Reading can be a very fun activity. The act of reading can take you to a different world. You can dive into the book. You can be immersed in the book. There are some people however who think that reading is a waste of time. They think their time is better spent doing something else such as playing outside or playing video games.

There have been many studies conducted by scientists researching the theory that reading makes you smarter. The study shows that reading books activates neural pathways. Participants went into an MRI scan after reading 30 pages. The study showed that there was a heightened connectivity to the temporal cortex on the left side of the brain. This part of the brain is what is associated with linguistic knowledge and intelligence.

There is also a study that shows if you read before you go to kindergarten the student does much better in every subject than somebody who was not introduced to reading. People who read can also grasp abstract concepts easier.

So what these studies show is that reading does make you smarter in one way or another. This does not mean that you should only read and never ever play video games. What this suggests is that maybe you should add reading into your daily routine. Just 20 minutes a day can go a long way. Reading will make you smarter and do much better in school.