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.

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?

through no intention on anyone’s part, will the increasing reliance of our youth on the servers of knowledge prove the greatest threat to the young brain’s building of its own foundation of knowledge, as well as to a child’s desire to think and imagine for him- or herself? 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? Will they develop a range of very different brain circuits? If so, what will be the implications of those different circuits for our society? Will the very diversity of such circuits benefit everyone? Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

In essence, the combination of these three principles forms the basis of what few of us would ever suspect: a reading circuit that incorporates input from two hemispheres, four lobes in each hemisphere (frontal, temporal, parietal, and occipital), and all five layers of the brain (from the uppermost telencephalon and adjacent diencephalon below it; to the middle layers of the mesencephalon; to the lower levels of the metencephalon and myelencephalon). 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.

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?

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.”

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.

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.

Robinson lamented what she saw as a political drift among many people in the United States toward seeing those different from themselves as the “sinister other.” She characterized this as “dangerous a development as there could be22 in terms of whether we continue to be a democracy.”

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 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.

She and her colleagues were frankly surprised that just by asking their literature graduate students either to read closely or to read for entertainment, different regions of the brain became activated, including multiple areas involved in motion and touch.

“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.

In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the “Matthew Effect”

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.

Paradoxically, most factual information today comes from external sources that can be unadjudicated and without proof of any form. How we analyze and use this information and whether we cease to deploy the time-consuming, critical processes to evaluate new information will significantly impact our future. Absent the checks and balances provided by both our prior knowledge content and our analytical processes, we run the risk of digesting information without questioning whether the quality or prioritization of the information available to us is accurate and free from external motivations and prejudices.42

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.”

Without concepts there can be no thought,48 and without analogies there can be no concepts . . . analogy is the fuel and fire of thinking. —Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander

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.

Nevertheless, critical analysis remains as difficult to define as to foster. From the standpoint of the reading brain, critical thought represents the full sum of the scientific-method processes. It synthesizes the text’s content with our background knowledge, analogies, deductions, inductions, and inferences and then uses this synthesis to evaluate the author’s underlying assumptions, interpretations, and conclusions. The careful formation of critical reasoning is the best way to inoculate the next generation against manipulative and superficial information, whether in text or on screen.

In the literary scholar Mark Edmundson’s laudable book Why Read?, he asks, “What exactly is critical thinking?”54 He explains that it includes the power to examine and potentially debunk personal beliefs and convictions. Then he asks, “What good is this power of critical thought if you do not yourself believe something and are not open to having these beliefs modified? What’s called critical thought generally takes place from no set position at all.”

The first threat comes when any powerful framework for understanding our world (such as a political or religious view) becomes so impenetrable to change and so rigidly adhered to that it obfuscates any divergent type of thought, even when the latter is evidence-based or morally based.

The second threat that Edmundson observes is the total absence of any developed personal belief system in many of our young people, who either do not know enough about past systems of thought (e.g., contributions by Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, or Noam Chomsky) or who are too impatient to examine and learn from them. As a result, their ability to learn the kind of critical thinking necessary for deeper understanding can become stunted. Intellectual rudderlessness and adherence to a way of thought that allows no questions are threats to critical thinking in us all.

As the philosopher Michael Patrick Lynch tells it, “Realization comes in a flash. . . .59 Insight . . . is the opening of a door, a ‘disclosing’ as Heidegger said. One acts by opening the door, and then one is acted upon by seeing what lies beyond. Understanding is a form of disclosure.”

We do not see or hear with the same quality of attention, because we see and hear too much, become habituated, and then seek still more.

By a calculus we largely neglect, the more constant the digital stimulation, the more prevalent the boredom and ennui expressed by even very young children when we take the devices away. Further, the more the devices are used, the more dependent the entire family becomes on longer periods of access to digital sources of entertainment, information, and distraction by all its members.

our attention is being chopped into shorter intervals and that is probably not good for thinking deeper thoughts.”

Neither deep reading nor deep thinking can be enhanced by the aptly named “chopblock” of time we are all experiencing, or by 34 gigabytes of anything per day.

have become so inundated with information that the average person in the United States now reads daily the same number of words as is found in many a novel. Unfortunately, this form of reading is rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated; rather, the average 34 gigabytes consumed by most of us represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another.

The journalist and writer David Ulin quoted a speech 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 of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

For them, education is knowing and lordly spectatorship, never the Socratic dialogue about how one ought to live one’s life.

the last thing a society needs is what Socrates feared: young people thinking they know the truth before they ever begin the arduous practice of searching for it.

The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention—a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits, but whose limits can be stretched. —Susan Sontag

Some recent studies find no significant medium-based differences29 in students’ general comprehension, at least when a text is relatively short, while other studies, particularly by Israeli scholars, show more specific differences favoring print reading when time is taken into account. Liu raises the question of whether the length of the texts might explain the different results among the studies done to date and whether longer texts would elicit more varied performances.

In his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr reminds us of a concern34 raised by Stanley Kubrick that in a digital culture we should not be worrying so much about whether the computer will become like us, but whether we will become like it. Reading research buttresses the validity of such concerns.

Naomi Baron cited a 2008 report commissioned by Lloyds TSB Insurance and rather dramatically titled “‘Five-Minute-Memory’ Costs Brits £1.6 Billion,” in which the average attention span of adults was determined to be a little over five minutes. Although five minutes may seem rather unimpressive,37 more noteworthy is that it is barely half of what it was only a decade earlier.

Our culture’s recipe would not be so much for forgetting, but for never remembering the same way in the first place: first because we are splitting our attention too much for our working memory to function optimally; and second, because we assume that in a digital world, we do not need to remember in the ways we remembered in the past. The current variation of Socrates’ worry is that our increased reliance on external forms of memory, combined with the attention-dividing bombardment by multiple sources of information, is cumulatively altering the quality and capacities of our working memory and ultimately its consolidation in long-term memory. And indeed there are some glum estimates that indicate that the average memory span of many adults has diminished by more than 50 percent over the last decade.

He simply looked at what is being imperceptibly lost by us as we “accidentally” abandon a view of the world in which beauty, truth, and goodness are inextricably linked and where the very perception of beauty can be a path to a life where virtue and nobility have rightful place.

In her essay “Decline,” Marilynne Robinson wrote that beauty among other important things is a “strategy of emphasis.43 If it is not recognized, the text is not understood.” Beauty helps us attend to what is most important. If our perception of beauty becomes reduced to skimming like a water strider across the thin surface of words, we will miss the depths below; we will never be led by beauty to learn and understand what lies beneath.

As we walked higher and higher to where the trees began to thin, I told him of my worries about the possible effects of the culture’s trend toward language homogenization: from the narrowing of an author’s word choices to briefer manuscripts to a more constrained use of syntactic complexity and figurative language, both of which require background knowledge that can no longer be assumed. What, then, will be the fate, he asked, of books and poems filled with metaphors and analogies whose referents are no longer shared knowledge? What would happen if a culture’s shared repertoire of allusions—metaphors from the Bible, myths, and fables; remembered lines of poems; characters from stories—begins to shrink and gradually disappear? What will happen, this learned publisher, who reads in multiple languages, asked, if the “language of books” no longer fits the culture’s cognitive style—fast, heavily visual, and artificially truncated? Will writing change and with it the reader, the writer, the publisher, language itself? Are we each witnessing in our different professions the beginning of a retreat from more intellectually demanding forms of language until—like the ill-fated procrustean bed—it conforms to the imperceptibly narrowing norms of reading on ever smaller screens?

As Alberto Manguel remarked about his own similarly book-built knowledge store, “Everything proceeds in geometric progression based49 on what is known and what is remembered every time we read something new.”

the varied processes of language, particularly syntax, reflect the convolutions of our thoughts.

The first is that students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly averse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis. The second is that student writing is deteriorating. I have, to be sure, heard this criticism of undergraduates as long as I have been teaching. The question is nevertheless important for every age to confront. In our epoch, we must ask whether current students’ diminishing familiarity with conceptually demanding prose and the daily truncating of their writing on social media is affecting their writing in more negative ways than in the past.

But just as the reported decline of empathy in our young people requires our collective scrutiny and understanding, so also does the more and more frequent observation that students are shying away from longer, more difficult texts and writing less well than in the immediate past. The central issue is not their intelligence, nor, more than likely, even their lack of familiarity with different styles of writing. Rather, it may come back to a lack of cognitive patience with demanding critical analytic thinking and a concomitant failure to acquire the cognitive persistence, what the psychologist Angela Duckworth famously called “grit,”54 nurtured by the very genres being avoided. Just as earlier I described how a lack of background knowledge and critical analytical skills can render any reader susceptible to unadjudicated or even false information, the insufficient formation and lack of use of these complex intellectual skills can render our young people less able to read and write well and therefore less prepared for their own futures.

Their development in the college years prepares them for the far more challenging forms of intellectual tenacity required of them after graduation: whether it is to write well-argued reports, documents, and briefs in their future professional lives; to critically read and evaluate the worth of a referendum, a court decision, medical documents, wills, investigative journalism, or a political candidate’s personal record; or even to differentiate truth from falsehood in the escalating issues around false news and reports.

Was I, for all purposes, about to desert the friends of a lifetime, relegating most of them perfunctorily to their alphabetized place, shelved in a different time?

Allegra Goodman65 wrote something wonderful about the process of unfolding that occurs in rereading a beloved book: “Like pleated fabric, the text reveals different parts . . . at different times. And yet every time the text unfolds, . . . the reader adds new wrinkles. Memory and experience press themselves into each reading so that each encounter informs the next.”

There is no going back, and with some historical digressions aside, there almost never has been. That accepted reality, however, must not deter anyone from informed, compassionate, critical analyses of who we have been, who we are, and the changes that are quietly shaping our children every day.