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

by Maryanne Wolf

The connections between how and what we read and what is written are critically important to today’s society.

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

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

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.

there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissues as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.”

And observing dementia is like watching stars wink out of the night skies, each one extinguishing full systems of memories

reading is neither natural nor innate; rather, it is an unnatural cultural invention that has been scarcely six thousand years in existence.

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.

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

“Open a book and a voice speaks.12 A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood.”

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

Put this poem next to "A Dream Deferred" and look at the parallels of the death of hope

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

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.

Turkle attributes the loss of empathy29 largely to their inability to navigate the online world without losing track of their real-time, face-to-face relationships. In her view our technologies place us at a remove, which changes not only who we are as individuals but also who we are with one another.

I cannot speak for or against a study I did not read, but when we have suffered through wars during the years before the Internet, before televison, and before the radio, I struggle to endorse reading as the means to promote globsl or even local empathy

The relationship between what we read and what we know will be fundamentally altered by too early and too great a reliance on external knowledge. We must be able to use our own knowledge base to grasp new information and interpret it with inference and critical analysis. The outline of the alternative is already clear: we will become increasingly susceptible human beings who are more and more easily led by sometimes dubious, sometimes even false information that we mistake for knowledge or, worse, do not care one way or another.

We need to ensure that human beings do not fall into the trap that Edward Tenner described when he said, “It would be a shame if brilliant technology43 were to end up threatening the kind of intellect that produced it.”

Only if we continuously work to develop and use our complex analogical and inferential skills will the neural networks underlying them sustain our capacity to be thoughtful, critical analysts of knowledge, rather than passive consumers of information.

“quiet eye”

When we retreat from the intrinsic complexity of human life for whatever reason, often as not we turn to what conforms to the narrowing confines of what we already know, never shaking or testing that base, never looking outside the boundaries of our past thought with all its earlier assumptions and sometimes dormant but ready-to-pounce prejudices.

the reality is that more and more of them are wonderfully adept at programming languages, but have a harder and harder time when I refer to a “coat of many colors,” “the quality of mercy,” or “the road not taken”—and this in New England.

When we do not share a common canon of literature, these metaphors will become anachronisms of a past culture, but now models of communication will emerge with new circles which may not be drawn from geographically common areas, but other shared experiences. The loss of what is familiar to one group may open a space for something more inclusive

Lev Vygotsky wrote in a remarkable book called Thought and Language,51 written language not only reflects our most difficult thoughts, it propels them further.

Socrates’ original worry that reading would permanently change thinking. “If men learn this, it will implant56 forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

Although . . . the Internet may develop impressive visual intelligence, the cost seems to be deep processing: mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection. —Patricia Greenfield2

the basic, commonsense principle is that the more exposure to (time spent with) any medium, the more the characteristics of the medium (affordances) will influence the characteristics of the viewer (learner).

Google CEO Eric Schmidt cautioned, “I worry that the level of interruption,30 the sort of overwhelming rapidity of information . . . is in fact altering cognition. It is affecting deeper thinking.”

For more than four decades, one of the single most important predictors12 of later reading achievement has been how much parents read to their child.

Deep reading is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.

There is a growing body of research on handwriting that demonstrates that when children learn to write their thoughts by hand in the early grades,10 they become better writers and thinkers.

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

Steve Wasserman asked in Truthdig, “Does the ethos of acceleration prized by the Internet diminish our capacity for deliberation and enfeeble our capacity for genuine reflection? Does the daily avalanche of information banish the space needed for actual wisdom? . . . Readers know . . . in their bones9 something we forget at our peril: that without books—indeed without literacy—the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs.”

Calvino described as a “rhythm of time that passes with no other aim12 than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.”

festina lente, which translates as “hurry slowly” or “hurry up slowly,”

The great, insufficiently discussed danger to a democracy stems not from the expression of different views but from the failure to ensure that all citizens are educated to use their full intellectual powers in forming those views. The vacuum that occurs26 when this is not realized leads ineluctably to a vulnerability to demagoguery, where falsely raised hopes and falsely raised fears trump reason and the capacity for reflective thinking recedes, along with its influence on rational, empathic decision making.

Wisdom, I conclude, is not contemplation alone,28 not action alone, but contemplation in action. —John Dunne

Word-work is sublime . . . 32because it is generative; it makes meaning that secures our difference, our human difference—the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. —Toni Morrison