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

by Maryanne Wolf

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.2 —David Ulin

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.

Both letters and memos are genres that bring Calvino’s emphases on “lightness” to issues whose great weight might otherwise make their discussion too heavy for many to confront. Letters allow thoughts that, even when as urgent as some of the ones to be described, contain those ineffable aspects of lightness and connection that provide the basis of a true dialogue between author and reader—all accompanied by an impetus for new thoughts in you that will go in different directions from my own.

Kant’s three questions14: What do we know? What should we do? What can we hope? In

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. In the final letter I elaborate how this reader—like the good society—embodies each of Aristotle’s three lives, even as the third life, the life of contemplation, is daily threatened in our culture. From the perspectives of neuroscience, literature, and human development I will argue that it is this form of reading that is our best chance at giving the next generation the foundation for the unique and autonomous life of the mind they will need in a world none of us can fully imagine. The expansive, encompassing processes that underlie insight and reflection in the present reading brain represent our best complement and antidote to the cognitive and emotional changes that are the sequelae of the multiple, life-enhancing achievements of a digital age.

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. Sincerely, Your Author

The neuroscientist David Eagleman recently wrote3 that the brain’s cells are “connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. . . . there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissues as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.”

A large, fundamental mistake—with many unfortunate consequences for children, teachers, and parents around the world—is the assumption that reading is natural to human beings and that it will simply emerge “whole cloth” like language when the child is ready. This is not the case; most of us7 must be taught the basic principles of this unnatural cultural invention.

What few people ever appreciate is how central attention is for every function that we perform and that multiple forms of attention go into action before our eyes even see the word.

There is an extremely tight relationship between the attentional system and the various kinds of memory.

Indeed, “there are as many connections”27 in the reading brain’s circuitry “as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.”

The quality of how we read any sentence or text depends, however, on the choices we make with the time we allocate to the processes of deep reading, regardless of medium. Everything we will consider in this book from this point forward—from the digital culture, the reading habits of our children and their children to the role of contemplation in ourselves and in society—rests on understanding the critically important but never guaranteed allocation of time to the processes that form the deep-reading circuit. This is true of both the development of the circuit in childhood and its maintenance over the course of our lives. It takes years for deep-reading processes to be formed, and as a society we need to be sure that we are vigilant about their development in our young from a very early age. It takes daily vigilance by us, the expert readers of our society, to choose to expend the extra milliseconds needed to maintain deep reading over time.

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?

When we reflect that “sentence”10 means, literally, “a way of thinking” . . . we realize that . . . a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought. . . . It is a pattern of felt sense. —Wendell Berry

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.

And there is a gift within a gift. Perspective taking not only connects our sense of empathy with what we have just read but also expands our internalized knowledge of the world. These are the learned capacities that help us become more human over time, whether as a child when reading Frog and Toad and learning what Toad does when Frog is sick or as an adult when reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, or James Baldwin’s I Am Not Your Negro, and experiencing the soul-stealing depravity of slavery and the desperation of those condemned to it or to its legacy. Through

“We read to know that we are not alone.”18

That this freely given immersion in the reading life could be threatened in our culture has begun to emerge as a concern for growing numbers in our society, including an NPR team that spent a whole interview with me on their personal concern about this loss. 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. And although it is a wonderful thing that movies and film can do some of this, too, there is a difference in the quality of immersion that is made possible by entering the articulated thoughts of others. What will happen to young readers who never meet and begin to understand the thoughts and feelings of someone totally different? What will happen to older readers who begin to lose touch with that feeling of empathy for people outside their ken or kin? It is a formula for unwitting ignorance, fear and misunderstanding, that can lead to the belligerent forms of intolerance that are the opposite of America’s original goals for its citizens of many cultures. Such

James Carroll’s book Christ Actually: The Son of God for the Secular Age

An answer to such scenarios is before our eyes: in the reciprocal relationship between background knowledge and deep reading. When you read carefully, you are more able to discern what is true and to add to it what you know. Ralph Waldo Emerson described this aspect of reading in his extraordinary speech “The American Scholar”: “When the mind is braced by labor and invention,40 the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant.” In reading research, the cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich suggested something similar some time ago about the development of word knowledge. In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the “Matthew Effect”41 after a passage in the New Testament. There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. Our young will not know what they do not know.