Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

human beings were never born to read.3 The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it. The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain’s repertoire.

What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace. In a span of only six millennia reading became the transformative catalyst for intellectual development within individuals and within literate cultures. The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.

It is more difficult still with children, whose attention is continuously distracted and flooded by stimuli that will never be consolidated in their reservoirs of knowledge. This means that the very basis of their capacity to draw analogies and inferences when they read will be less and less developed. Young reading brains are evolving without a ripple of concern by most people, even though more and more of our youths are not reading other than what is required and often not even that: “tl; dr” (too long; didn’t read).

As I chronicle in these letters, there is as much reason for excitement as caution if we turn our attention to the specific changes in the evolving reading brain that are happening now and may happen in different ways in a few short years. This is because the transition from a literacy-based culture to a digital one differs radically from previous transitions from one form of communication to another.

What we can learn, therefore, about the impact of different forms of reading on cognition and culture has profound implications for the next reading brains.

With sudden and complete clarity I saw what would happen if those children could not learn the seemingly simple act of passage into a culture based on literacy. They would never fall down a hole and experience the exquisite joys of immersion in the reading life.

They would never experience the great shift that moves from reading about characters like the Lightning Thief and Matilda to believing they could become heroes and heroines themselves.

I realized in a whiplash burst that those children, all mine for one year, might never reach their full potential as human beings if they never learned to read.

set out to understand how human beings acquire written words and use written language to great advantage for their own intellectual development and that of future generations. I never looked back.

Because of them, I became a cognitive neuroscientist and a scholar of reading.

More specifically, I conduct research on what the brain does when it reads and why some children and adults have greater difficulty learning how to read than others do.

There was almost no research being conducted then on the formation of a digital reading brain.

There were no significant studies about what was happening in the brains of children (or adults) as they learned to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium six to seven hours a day (a figure that has since almost doubled for many of our youth).

Translation: the young reader can either develop all the multiple deep-reading9 processes that are currently embodied in the fully elaborated, expert reading brain; or the novice reading brain can become “short-circuited” in its development; or it can acquire whole new networks in different circuits. There will be profound differences in how we read and how we think, depending on which processes dominate the formation of the young child’s reading circuit.

Will new readers develop the more time-demanding cognitive processes nurtured by print-based mediums as they absorb and acquire new cognitive capacities emphasized by digital media?

For example, will the combination of reading on digital formats and daily immersion in a variety of digital experiences—from social media to virtual games—impede the formation of the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that are all part of deep reading?

Will the mix of continuously stimulating distractions of children’s attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehou...

Or will these new technologies provide the best, most complete bridge yet to ever more sophisticated forms of cognition and imagination that will enable our children to leap into new worlds of knowledge that we can’t even conceive of in this moment of time?

Perhaps counterintuitively, I have chosen a rather odd, even anachronistic genre from the past, a book of letters, to address issues about a future that is changing moment by moment. I do so for reasons that spring from my experiences both as reader and as author.

Letters invite a kind of cerebral pause in which we can think with each other and, if very fortunate, experience a special kind of encounter, what Marcel Proust called the “fertile miracle of communication”11 that occurs without ever moving from your chair.

The illusion of being informed by a daily deluge of eye-byte-sized information can trump the critical analysis of our complex realities.

Given their more particular worries, many parents and grandparents have asked me the equivalent of Kant’s three questions14: What do we know? What should we do? What can we hope?

There are no shortcuts for becoming a good reader, but there are lives that propel and sustain it. Aristotle wrote that the good society16 has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation. So, too, the good reader.

You won’t agree with me all the time, and that is as it should be. Like St. Thomas Aquinas, I look at disagreement as the place where “iron sharpens iron.”17 That

My third goal is simply what Proust hoped for each of his readers: It seemed to me that they would not be18 “my readers” but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass. . . . I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.

Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of our attention?

Will our quality of attention in reading—the basis of the quality of our thought—change inexorably as our culture transitions away from a print-based culture toward a digital one?

What are the cognitive threats to and the promises of such a transition?

Take one of the most compelling “short short stories” ever written. It emerged as the result of a wager made to Ernest Hemingway by his unruly group of writing friends. They bet him that he couldn’t write a story in six words. It is hardly surprising that Hemingway took and won the bet. The surprise is that he felt that this story was one of his finest pieces of writing. He was right. With a bare minimum of words, he evoked one of the most powerful visual images, and also some of the same deep-reading processes we might utilize when reading his longer works.

Here is his story in six words: For sale: baby shoes, never worn.13

Thus, in six terse words Hemingway presented an image capable of giving the reader a range of personal emotions: a wrenching sense of the feelings such a loss would bring; a barely suppressed relief at not having had the experience, with the sting of guilt that follows such a sense of relief; and, perhaps, a prayerlike hope never to know the feeling more intimately.

The act of taking on the perspective and feelings of others is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes.

The narrative theologian John S. Dunne described this process of encounter and perspective taking in reading as the act of “passing over,”15 in which we enter into the feelings, imaginings, and thoughts of others through a particular kind of empathy: “Passing over is never total but is always partial and incomplete. And there is an equal and opposite process of coming back to oneself.” It is a beautifully apt description for how we move from our inherently circumscribed views of the world to enter another’s and return enlarged.

For theologians such as John Dunne and writers such as Gish Jen,17 whose lifework illumines this principle in fiction and nonfiction alike, the act of reading is a special place in which human beings are freed from themselves to pass over to others and, in so doing, learn what it means to be another person with aspirations, doubts, and emotions that they might otherwise never have known.

Drama makes more visible what each of us does when we pass over in our deepest, most immersive forms of reading. We welcome the Other as a guest within ourselves, and sometimes we become Other. For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally. And sometimes, as this remarkable young woman’s example shows us, we experience what life has not allowed us. It is an incalculable gift.

As expressed in the play Shadowlands, about the life of C. S. Lewis, “We read to know that we are not alone.”18

One of the most concrete renderings of this latter concept can be found in the most unlikely of historical persons, Niccolò Machiavelli. In order that he might better enter the consciousness and “converse” with the authors he was reading, he would dress formally in the style of dress appropriate to the authors in their various epochs.

There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them.

The novelist Jane Smiley worries that it is just this dimension in fiction that is most threatened by our culture: “My guess is that mere technology will not kill36 the novel. . . . But novels can be sidelined. . . . When that happens, our society will be brutalized and coarsened by people . . . who have no way of understanding us or each other.” It is a chilling reminder of how important the life of reading is for human beings if we are to form an ever more realized democratic society for everyone.