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I agree, there's not enough evidence shown in this article to warrant the conclusion. That the brain had to work harder to process the text doesn't necessarily mean that you got more out of the text. I'd like to see brain scans of people reading Shakespeare, but in two groups. Group A hasn't read any Shakespeare, while Group B are experienced Shakespeare readers. The readers in Group A are going to have a much harder time with the text. I'd expect their brains to work much harder to understand the text than will those of Group B. But who is going to get more out of the text? Probably Group B, even though Group B's brains didn't have to work nearly as hard.
I suppose we could scan people's brains when they read The Eye of Argon, the brain has to work pretty hard to make sense out of that. Yet I have a hard time believing that the difficulty of reading a bad text makes me smarter just because my brain worked harder. What Shakespeare and The Eye of Argon have in common is that it is difficult to decode the text. Obviously, the content of Shakespeare is deeper than The Eye of Argon.
The article isn't just saying that reading Shakespeare makes you smarter, but that it better at making you smarter than reading "trashy" novels. I suspect that the people who did this study would lump science fiction in the trashy category, yet science fiction does as a lot of profound questions. Of course, not all science fiction is profound, but not all Elizabethan writing is profound either.
There's a question of how much benefit you get out of decoding the text versus reading the content itself. If the benefit comes from how difficult decoding the text is, then it would seem that to get this benefit, readers of Shakespeare should read something that they are unfamiliar with, as the brain has to work harder to process the unfamiliar. I'm open to the idea, but simply measuring how hard the brain works isn't enough. They need to come up some way to test the hypothesis.
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