An informed summary of some research on reading (with a less than surprising conclusion), but well written:
“The upshot” (as a college math professor of mine liked to say at the end of class):
The study suggests that reading and other cognitive activities really are good for you, and may help slow cognitive decline. It’s a nice study, the longitudinal design is a good one, and they were careful to work with participants only when they had complete sets of data.”
From a group blog called http://scientopia.org/blogs. This in turn led me to the Science News blog (where the unnamed author of the piece about the writing study now works, and which is a great browse, perhaps not as cognitively helpful as reading but still fun.
A Few Reasonable Words 