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

by Maryanne Wolf

Will the time-consuming, cognitively demanding deep-reading processes atrophy or be gradually lost within a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, immediacy, high levels of stimulation, multitasking, and large amounts of information?

7 Like Frank Schirrmacher, the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin places such attention-flitting, task-switching behavior within the context of our evolutionary reflex, the novelty bias that pulls our attention immediately toward anything new: “Humans will work just as hard to obtain8 a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate. . . . In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one.”

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.” It would be an intellectual shame to think that in the spirit of giving our children as much as we can through the many creative offerings of the latest, enhanced e-books and technological innovations, we may inadvertently deprive them of the motivation and time necessary to build their own images of what is read and to construct their own imaginative off-line worlds that are the invisible habitats of childhood.

This clinician’s concern is that the increasing number of children diagnosed with attention-based learning deficits may reflect not only better, earlier diagnoses, but also the creation of new forms of attention deficit in a generation of distracted children.16

Given the increasing numbers of distractions that populate the digital worlds of many children, we have to ask whether greater numbers of children who are otherwise typical are becoming prone to behaviors similar to children diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder because of their environments. If so, what other effects might such changes have on different aspects of their development?

We are perched on a cusp between the promise and delivery of ever greater contributions by our digital culture to every aspect of our lives (including their extension) and a dawning realization of the unanticipated consequences that accompany them.

Despite most children’s expressed preference for digital reading, they performed better in print form in comprehending what they read.

In cognitive development terms, recursion aids looking back, which aids children’s monitoring of what they comprehend, which helps them rehearse the details more in working memory, which helps them consolidate what they learn in long-term memory. If they are unconsciously processing information on the screen more like film, the plot’s details would appear more evanescent and less concrete. Quite literally, the sequencing of those details would blur in memory, just as they seemed to in Mangen’s older subjects and, most likely, in much younger children, too.

I am hypothesizing that film both provides a helpful metaphor for explaining what may be occurring in a child’s working memory, and also may itself have become a physiological habit of mind for viewing anything upon a screen. The upshot would be less effective uses of various forms of memory in today’s children, but not necessarily unalterable changes, at least at the start of childhood.

For many children in Western culture, that environment is providentially rich in what it gives, but paradoxically today, it may give too much and ask too little. 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.

In the first quarter of the twenty-first century, our children need to be educated like those fictional scientists from kindergarten through high school to develop both technological acumen and deep stores of internalized knowledge.

During an interview with Charlie Rose, 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.”

No self-respecting internal review board at any university would allow a researcher to do what our culture has already done with no adjudication or previous evidence: introduce a complete, quasi-addictive set of attention-compelling devices without knowing the possible side effects and ramifications for the subjects (our kids).

Josh Elman, another Silicon Valley expert who applauds34 Harris’s efforts, compares the use of the addictive features of various devices to the tobacco industry’s use of addiction-forming nicotine before the link with cancer was discovered.

the infant’s amygdala (which is involved in emotional aspects of memory) lays down its neural networks before networks are formed for its close neighbor, the hippocampus, the better-known store place of memory. It is a rather endearing physiological nod to Sigmund Freud, John Bowlby, Mary Ainsworth, and all those early figures in the history of psychology who emphasized the profound importance of early emotions and attachment in a child’s life.

Putting an iPad in one’s mouth is just not the same.

Second, research by developmental psychologists over the last several years shows that children who are raised with and without the so-called bells and whistles of various devices differ in early language development around two years of age. Children who receive most of their linguistic input from humans do better on language indices.

God made Man because He loves stories.18 —Elie Wiesel

We are all creatures of obsession, children just more so. They will become obsessed with whatever captures their attention, and there are few more effective attention getters than screens that move and buzz and bathe their senses in the hormones usually meant for fight or flight.

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.

Most children who are underserved in the first five years of life underperform in the next five and the next, and they continue to be underserved for the rest of their years.

Over the last half century our society has gradually handed over to teachers, arguably its most idealistic members, all the ills that society itself could not “fix,” particularly the pernicious effects of poverty and stressful environments on early child development.

Within such a perspective, teachers of children from five to ten years of age would give ample, explicit attention to every component of the reading circuit: from phonemes and their connections to letters; to the meanings and functions of words and morphemes (e.g., the smallest units of meaning) in sentences; to an immersion in stories that require ever more sophisticated deep-reading processes; to the daily elicitation of the children’s own thoughts and imagination in speaking and writing.

Fluency is not simply about the speed of decoding, an assumption that has led to the common but insufficient practice of having children reread a passage over and over again.

This body of randomized treatment-control studies (the gold standard of research in medicine and education) demonstrates that when the major components in the reading circuit are explicitly emphasized—the earlier the better—children become more proficient readers, even when they begin with significant challenges like dyslexia.

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.

What that fourth-grade teacher lacked was not compassion. What was lacking was the kind of knowledge that would have given her the basis for understanding that not all kids come to or leave grade four able to read fluently; the kind of training that would have enabled her to teach older children to do just that; the motivation to work until no child in her classroom failed. The teaching of reading is hard, full of pitfalls, with obstacles all along the way until children reach the level of proficiency that allows them, whatever their learning trajectory, to pass over from the text to their own thoughts and return enriched.

Through this five-to-ten-year period, the goal is to instill in children the expectation that if they take their time, they will have their own ideas.

At the surface level, our twenty-first-century children appear more cognizant of their connected world than ever before, but they are not necessarily building the deeper forms of knowledge about others that enable them to feel what it means to be someone else and to understand that other’s feelings.

The results ran counter to every hoped-for outcome: simply providing access to digital tools to underserved children could actually have deleterious effects, if there was no participation by parents. The children in that study did significantly worse on tests of literacy than other children did, and the disparities between groups increased after technological devices were introduced, particularly when the children used them for entertainment purposes.

Years ago the philosopher Martin Heidegger felt that the great danger in an age of technological ingenuity like ours is that it could spawn an “indifference toward meditative thinking. . . .7 Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature—the keeping of the meditative thinking alive.”

More and more of us would then think we know something based on information whose source was chosen because it conforms to how and what we thought before. Thus, though we are seemingly well armed, there begins to be less and less motivation to think more deeply, much less try on views that differ from one’s own. We think we know enough, that misleading mental state that lulls us into a form of passive cognitive complacency that precludes further reflection and opens wide the door for others to think for us. This

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.

Bonhoeffer described this old scenario from his prison cell: If we look more closely,23 we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind; indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law: the power of some needs the folly of the others. It is not that certain human capacities, intellectual capacities for instance, become stunted or destroyed, but rather that the upsurge of power makes such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment and . . . give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves.

In a dialogue between Umberto Eco and Cardinal Carlo Maria Martini, the cardinal reiterated a timeless view of the democratic process that is pertinent to this conclusion: “The delicate game of democracy provides24 for a dialectic of opinions and beliefs in the hope that such exchange will expand the collective moral conscience that is the basis of orderly cohabitation.”

If we in the twenty-first century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well. We will fail as a society if we do not educate our children and reeducate all of our citizenry to the responsibility of each citizen to process information vigilantly, critically, and wisely across media. And we will fail as a society as surely as societies of the twentieth century if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us.

We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives. —Toni Morrison