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.

What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace. In a span of only six millennia reading became the transformative catalyst for intellectual development within individuals and within literate cultures. The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.

I began in earnest to think about reading’s capacity to change the course of an individual life. What I hadn’t a clue about then was the deeply generative nature of written language and what it means—literally and physiologically—for generating new thoughts, not only for a child but for our society.

Translation: the 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?

The illusion of being informed by a daily deluge of eye-byte-sized information can trump the critical analysis of our complex realities.

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

Within these pages the meanings of good reader have little to do with how well anyone decodes words; they have everything to do with being faithful to what Proust once described as the heart of the reading act, going beyond the wisdom of the author to discover one’s own.

There are no shortcuts for becoming a good reader, but there are lives that propel and sustain it. 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. So, too, the good reader.

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

The act of taking on the perspective and feelings of others is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes.

Drama makes more visible what each of us does when we pass over in our deepest, most immersive forms of reading. We welcome the Other as a guest within ourselves, and sometimes we become Other. For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally. And sometimes, as this remarkable young woman’s example shows us, we experience what life has not allowed us. It is an incalculable gift. And there is a gift within a gift. Perspective taking not only connects our sense of empathy with what we have just read but also expands our internalized knowledge of the world. These are the learned capacities that help us become more human over time,

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.

Reading at the deepest levels may provide one part of the antidote to the noted trend away from empathy. But make no mistake: empathy is not solely about being compassionate toward others; its importance goes further. For it is also about a more in-depth understanding of the Other, an essential skill in a world of increasing connectedness among divergent cultures.

Empathy involves, therefore, both knowledge and feeling. It involves leaving past assumptions behind and deepening our intellectual understanding of another person, another religion, another culture and epoch. In this moment in our collective history, the capacity for compassionate knowledge of others may be our best antidote to the “culture of indifference” that spiritual leaders such as the Dalai Lama, Bishop Desmond Tutu, and Pope Francis describe. It may also be our best bridge to others with whom we need to work together, so as to create a safer world for all its inhabitants. In the very special cognitive space within the reading-brain circuit, pride and prejudice can gradually dissolve through the compassionate understanding of another’s mind. This emerging work on empathy in the reading brain illustrates physiologically, cognitively, politically, and culturally how important it is that feeling and thought be connected in the reading circuit in every person. The quality of our thought depends on the background knowledge and feelings we each bring to bear.

Albert Einstein said that our theories of the world determine what we see. So also in reading. We must have our own wheelhouse of facts to see and evaluate new information, whatever the medium.

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.

Most of us think we are exercising critical thinking, but if we are honest with ourselves, we realize that we are doing so less than we imagine. We believe we will allocate time to it “later,” that invisible wastebasket of lost intentions.

“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.”

Whether from Ulin’s perspective as a journalist, a president’s perspective as a protector of the nation’s youth, or Edmundson’s perspective as a teacher of young adults, 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 “7 plus or minus 2 rule” is why most phone numbers have seven numbers, with the area code, according to Miller, able to be recalled as one unit in memory. In his later memoirs, Miller wrote that the number seven was more metaphorical than precise. In fact, the recent work on working memory suggests that the number of bits we can hold without errors may well be “4 plus or minus 1.”36

Like insight, the perception of beauty, whether in reading or in art, emerges out of many of the same capacities that compose deep reading. And, like insight, only the time we give to those capacities allows our perception of beauty to “father forth”42 long enough for us to see, recognize, and understand more. For just as reading is not solely visual, beauty is not simply about the senses. 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.

In her wonderful book Rereadings, Anne Fadiman compared reading to rereading a book: “the former had more velocity; the latter had more depth.”62 My experience as a digital screen reader trying to reread Hesse’s masterpiece was the opposite: I had tried to reread it as quickly as possible, and I had failed. Indeed, Naomi Baron63 predicted that the shift to screen reading would diminish our desire for rereading, which would be a great loss since each age at which we read brings a different person to the text. In my case, only when I forced myself to enter the book did I experience, first, slowing down; second, becoming immersed in the other world in the book; and third, being lifted out of my own.

The novelist 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.”

“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.”

You and I can hold two seemingly contradictory thoughts37 and not be overwhelmed by cognitive dissonance. We have reached a point where the intellectual development of our children cannot be conceptualized within a binary communication dilemma, in which one medium is intrinsically better than another. Up to this point, I have cautioned about the potential negative effects of the digital medium’s affordances. Nevertheless, I am convinced that with more wisdom than we have demonstrated to date, we can combine science with technology in ways that will help discern what is best and when for each individual child from birth to adolescence, with all the mediums, devices, and digital tools at our disposal used optimally.

It is the stuff of conceptual and linguistic development (even though you might come to think it the stuff of something else entirely after the umpteenth rereading). Just remember that it is both contributing to the concepts and words your child knows already and laying the base for what comes next. Analogical thought builds within those well-worn pages, and language development flourishes. 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.

And what do we learn from Seuss?2 The joy of words and pictures at play, of course, but also the best and most humane values any of us wish to possess: pluck, determination, tolerance, reverence for the earth, suspicion of the martial spirit, the fundamental value of the imagination. This is why early reading matters. —Michael Dirda

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.

As Alec Ross,2 the author of The Industries of the Future, wrote, 65 percent of the jobs our present preschoolers will hold in the future haven’t even been invented yet.

The philosopher Nicholas of Cusa can help us. He believed that the best way to choose between two seemingly equal but contradicting perspectives—what he called the “coincidence of opposites”—was to assume the stance of learned ignorance,3 in which one strives to thoroughly understand both positions and then goes outside them to evaluate and decide the course to be taken. Knowledge

Like Flannery O’Connor, “I can, with one eye squinted,37 take it all as a blessing.”

In the first half of the twentieth century, T. S. Eliot wrote in “Choruses from ‘The Rock,’” “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?11 Where is the knowledge we have lost in 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.

The place of stillness that you have to go to write,19 but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world. . . . —Jonathan Franzen

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.

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