Book snobs who insist that reading literature is superior to listening to an audiobook may want to look away now.

Neuroscientists have discovered that the same cognitive and emotional parts of the brain are stimulated whether a person hears words, or reads them on a page.

A YouGov study carried out in 2016 found that just 10 per cent of Britons believed that listening to an audiobook was the same as having read the physical version, with the majority believing it was a lesser form of culture.

But experts at the University of California, Berkeley, disagree.

Lead author Dr Fatma Deniz, a researcher in neuroscience said: “At a time when more people are absorbing information via audiobooks, podcasts and even audio texts, our study shows that, whether they're listening to or reading the same materials, they are processing semantic information similarly.

“We knew that a few brain regions were activated similarly when you hear a word and read the same word, but I was not expecting such strong similarities in the meaning representation across a large network of brain regions in both these sensory modalities.”