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

by Maryanne Wolf

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

what Proust once described as the heart of the reading act, going beyond the wisdom of the author to discover one’s own.

Like St. Thomas Aquinas, I look at disagreement as the place where “iron sharpens iron.”

Anyone who still believes the archaic canard that we use only a tiny portion of our brains hasn’t yet become aware of what we do when we read.

Just as the cognitive scientist David Swinney25 underscored years ago, our words contain and momentarily activate whole repositories of associated meanings, memories, and feelings, even when the exact meaning in a given context is specified.

. a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what

unanticipated decline of empathy among our young people. The MIT scholar Sherry Turkle described a study28 by Sara Konrath and her research group at Stanford University that showed a 40 percent decline in empathy in our young people over the last two decades, with the most precipitous decline in the last ten years. Turkle attributes the loss of empathy29 largely to their inability to navigate the online world without

Singer emphasizes that this larger network comprises, among other areas, the highly connected neuronal networks for theory of mind, including the insula and the cingulate cortex, which function to connect large expanses of the human brain.

York University colleague Raymond Mar suggest that the process of taking on another’s consciousness in reading fiction and the nature of fiction’s content—where the great emotions and conflicts of life are regularly played out—not only contribute to our empathy, but represent what the social scientist Frank Hakemulder called our “moral laboratory.”35 In this sense, when we read fiction, the brain actively simulates the consciousness of another person, including those whom we would never otherwise even imagine knowing.

stunted. Intellectual rudderlessness and adherence to a way of thought that allows no questions are threats to critical thinking in us all.

by Barack Obama to students at Hampton University in which he worried that for many of our young, information has become “a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment,20 rather than a tool

Look this up

In other words, the sequencing of the sometimes easily overlooked details in a fictional story appeared to be lost by the students who were reading on a digital screen.

Among the many worlds which man did not receive67 as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own spirit, the world of books is the greatest.

As Steiner-Adair wrote, “If they become addicted to playing on screens,12 children will not know how to move through that fugue state they call boredom, which is often a necessary prelude to creativity.”

Maggie Jackson27 made the thought-provoking point that when there is too much information overload, the building of background knowledge actually becomes more difficult. Like my speculations about a child’s working memory, she argues that because we are given so much input, we no longer expend the necessary time to rehearse, make analogies, and store incoming information in the same way, which affects what we know and how we draw inferences.

When you read to your children, you are exposing them to multiple representations—of the sounds or phonemes in spoken words, of the visual forms of letters and letter patterns in written words, of the meanings of oral and written words, and so on across every circuit component.

One of the characteristics that anchors the earliest experience of reading is physicality; another is recurrence:

The input that comes from nonhuman sources is one step removed and not focused on one special child. Further, as engaging as such external sources can be, they rarely focus the eye’s gaze or the toddler’s ear on exactly what is being said or learned. In the world of the youngest children, we humans matter more. It seems almost a pity that we need to prove that.

that Mother Goose rhymes are one of the best preparations for focusing the child’s attention on the phonemes of words. Whether “Little Miss Muffet” or “Hickory, Dickory, Dock” turns the child’s attention to the alliterated first sounds or rhymed last sounds, what researchers call phoneme awareness is quietly developing in each child unawares—just

The fourth grade represents a Maginot Line between learning to read and learning to use reading to think and learn.

More disturbing altogether, close to half of our children who are African-American or Latino do not read in grade four at even a “basic” reading level, much less a proficient one. This means they do not decode well enough to understand what they are reading, which will impact almost everything they are supposed to learn from then on, including math and other subjects.

The Bureaus of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics.

demonstrates that when children learn to write their thoughts by hand in the early grades,10 they become better writers and thinkers.

Will biliteracy prove yet another class-based obstacle to their success?

Her most thought-provoking result was that the highest-performing print readers were often the lowest-performing online readers,

arcia/tl (attend, remember, connect, infer, analyze/then LEAP!)

“Time,” Eva Hoffman beseeches us to consider how “the need for reflection, for making sense of our transient condition, is time’s paradoxical gift to us, and possibly the best consolation.”

information?” In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.

Twenty years ago Martha Nussbaum wrote about the susceptibility and the decision making of citizens who have ceded their thinking to others: It would be catastrophic to become a nation22 of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others. And yet, unless we support these endeavors, it is in such a nation that we may well live. It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship.