When you go to the park, you might notice many older people listening to audiobooks (有声书). Audiobooks have become quite welcome these days. Why are more and more people choosing audiobooks over paper books? Is listening to an audiobook just as beneficial (有益的) as reading a book?
Reading needs us to focus (集中) all our attention(注意) on the words in a book, and we also need to find time and a place to sit down and read. However, you can listen to audiobooks any time and any place you like, and it gives your eyes a break, too.
But the big question is, do we get knowledge from audiobooks as effectively (有效地) as we do from paper books? Researchers did a study to find the answer. Volunteers (志愿者) in Group One were asked to listen to an audiobook while volunteers in Group Two read a book of the same content (内容). It turned out that they recalled the same amount of information, whether they listened to it or read it.
Another study published in the Journal of Neuroscience further supported (支持) the result above. In the study, researchers scanned people's brains when they listened to and read books, and they learned how their brains worked. The result showed that listening to audiobooks activates (激活) almost the same parts of the brain as reading does.
However, some people still believe that they learn better from reading paper books. One reason might be that when we listen to audiobooks, we are often multitasking (处理多个任务). "If you're trying to learn while doing two things, you're not going to learn as well," Daniel Willingham, a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia, told The New York Times.