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"Watching videos is a more passive form of engagement than reading. Hutton recently collected brain images of children, all 3 to 5 years old, as they took in stories in different formats. 1/6

When children watched an animated video of a story, they used the region of the brain associated with imagination about half as much as they did when looking at static illustrations while listening to an audio recording. 2/6

Children also used their cerebellum—a part of the brain associated with learning—less when watching a video. “They don’t really have to use their imagination as much, because things are happening on the screen,” Hutton told me. “The brain’s just doing less work to understand and learn from what 3/6

they’re seeing in the animated, compared to the illustrated.” The paradox is that although video contains more information than text—not just language but sounds and moving images—it does not stimulate deeper thinking. 4/6