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

by Maryanne Wolf

The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens.

Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium13

As one novelist describes this handoff, “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.”

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.

James Carroll’s

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.

The novelist Jane Smiley worries that it is just this dimension in fiction that is most threatened by our culture: “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.”

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.

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.

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.

An insight is a fleeting glimpse of the brain’s huge store58 of unknown knowledge. The cortex is sharing one of its secrets. —Jonah Lehrer

In common things that round us lie2 Some random truths he can impart, —The harvest of a quiet eye. —William Wordsworth

To be a moral human being24 is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention. . . . 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

When publishers are forced to consider the needs of a different reader, one whose typical skimming style is ill suited to long, densely worded texts, to complex thoughts not easily (or quickly) grasped, or to words deemed less than necessary, the culture suffers in ways we cannot measure. Things go missing in such a context, unnoted till they are absent.

The future of language is linked both to the sustained efforts by writers to find those words that direct us to their hard-won thought and to the sustained efforts by readers to reciprocate by applying their best thought to what is read.

I am increasingly worried, therefore, about the relationship between the number of characters with which we choose to read or write and how we think. Never more so than now; never more so than with our young adults, or with those who would lead our governments around the world.

failures, like enemies, can be our best teachers, if we can see them as opportunities for recognizing what we need to change.

Children are a sign.1 They are a sign of hope, a sign of life, but also a “diagnostic” sign, a marker indicating the health of families, society, and the entire world. Wherever children are accepted, loved, cared for and protected, the family is healthy, society is more healthy and the world is more human. —Pope Francis

As Eva Hoffman wrote about adults, our computer-based sense of time is “habituating us to ever faster and shorter units of thought and perception.”29

But just because infants cannot articulate their thoughts, it does not mean that they are not processing language, and from the very start. In a fascinating research study, Stanislas Dehaene and his wife, the neuropediatrician Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz, looked at the brain activation of two-month-old infants while they listened to their mothers speak. Using a very comfortable adaptation of fMRI,5 they found that the same language network that we use for listening to speech was activated in those babies.

One of the most salient influences on young children’s attention involves the shared gaze that occurs and develops while parents read to them. With little conscious effort children learn to focus their visual attention on what their parent or caretaker is looking at without losing an ounce of their own curiosity and exploratory behaviors. As the philosopher Charles Taylor notes, “The crucial condition for human language6 learning is joint attention,” which he and others who are involved in studying the ontogenesis of language consider one of the most important features of human evolution.

New brain-imaging research led by the pediatric neurologist John Hutton,7 Scott Holland, and their colleagues at the Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center provides a never-before-seen look at the extensive activation of language networks in young children who are read to, in this case, by their mothers.

When you speak to your children, you expose them to words that are all around them. A wonderful thing. When you read to your children, you expose them to words they never hear in other places and to sentences no one around them uses. This is not simply the vocabulary of books, it is the grammar of stories and books and the rhythm and alliteration of rhymes and limericks and lyrics that are not to be found anywhere else quite so delightfully.

Many very young viewers all too quickly are literally and cognitively left to their own devices—to be continuously entertained by a very flat thing, which possesses neither the lap nor the voice of their most beloved persons reading and speaking just to them.

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.

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.

The universal moral laws every culture possesses begin with stories.

The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall hypothesizes from a literary perspective that stories help our children and indeed all of us “practice reacting to the kinds of challenges20 that are, and always were, most crucial to our success as a species.”

The empathy learned in stories like these expands the world of childhood and teaches an essential human value: kinship and sympathy with “other.”

This is the nature of transitions. It is important that we neither lurch forward with little reference to what we know nor retreat backward.

Shared attention, as Charles Taylor wrote, is the beginning of the great dance of language that joins one generation to the next, not forced attention.

(National Assessment of Educational Progress) documents that a full two-thirds of US children in the fourth grade do not read at a “proficient” level,

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.

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.

Disheartening

the relationship between grade-four reading levels and dropping out of school is a bitter, overwhelmingly significant finding. She contends that if this many children are seriously underperforming in the schools, our country cannot maintain its leading economic position in the world.

Council on Foreign Relations issued a report in which it stated with no ambiguity, “Large, undereducated swaths of the population damage8 the ability of the United States to physically defend itself, protect its secure information, conduct diplomacy, and grow its economy.”

Every school community should watch the documentary The Raising of America,18 by the filmmaker Christine Herbes-Sommers,

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.

Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity:

bilingual and multilingual speakers have spent years going back and forth between languages. Not only are they more flexible in retrieving words and concepts, but there is some research that indicates that they are also more capable of leaving their particular viewpoints and taking on the perspective of others.

Lifelong Kindergarten group at the MIT Media Lab,

discussing the good, the bad, the attractive, and the potentially harmful realities of Internet usage should become this culture’s version of the sex education courses of the past

Susan Neuman and Donna Celano31 described one of the most discouraging studies to date about digital access in their report of an initiative within libraries in Philadelphia. The noble intention of the study was to investigate the effects of providing books and digital access in libraries to underserved children and families. 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.

vividly pointed out that in Musk’s lexicon, the word impossible is translated as Phase One.

As the short-story writer Patricia McKillip wrote, “The future—any future—was simply36 one step at a time out of the heart.”

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

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.”

as 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? . . .

It is easy to forget that the contemplative dimension that resides within us is not a given and requires intention and time to be sustained. How we reckon with the time we are given—in milliseconds, hours, and days—may well be the most important thing any of us chooses in an age of continuous flux. In her beautiful essay “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.”