Looking for a novel way to live longer? Try picking up a book

Researchers argue that the sheer intellectual effort of “deep reading” keeps the brain active and helps people to make better decisions well into later life
Researchers argue that the sheer intellectual effort of “deep reading” keeps the brain active and helps people to make better decisions well into later life
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“Do not read,” the French novelist Gustave Flaubert once said, “as children do, to amuse yourself, or like the ambitious, for the purpose of instruction. No, read in order to live.”

He was literally right, according to a study that claims people who read books enjoy a significant “survival advantage” over those who do not. Ominously, they also appear to live longer than magazine or newspaper readers.

Researchers argue that the sheer intellectual effort of “deep reading” — following the arc of ideas, characters or plot over several hundred pages without forgetting which one Gandalf was or why the workers of the world should bother uniting — keeps the brain active and helps people to make better decisions well into later life. Books can also