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.

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.

English has around forty-four different phonemes18

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.

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.

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.

Phillips and her colleagues found that when we read a piece of fiction “closely,” we activate regions of the brain that are aligned to what the characters are both feeling and doing. 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.

We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips.

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.

In what is as close as scientists get to expressing exasperation in a peer-reviewed publication, they conclude, “It might be stated that creativity is everywhere.”

However we conceptualize Emerson’s “quarry” of language and thought,66 each reader of this book knows what is to be found there: the inestimable thoughts that from time to time irradiate our consciousness with brief, luminous glimpses of what lies outside the boundaries of all we thought before. In such moments, deep reading provides our finest vehicle to travel outside the circumferences of our lives.

A recent study by Time Inc.9 of the media habits of people in their twenties indicated that they switched media sources twenty-seven times an hour. On average they now check their cell phone between 150 and 190 times a day.

To be sure, there are many thoughtful readers (and writers) such as James Wood who are reassured by the fact that we are all reading more, not less.

Liu and various eye-movement researchers have described how digital reading often as not involves an F or zigzag style in which we rapidly “word-spot” through a text (often on the left-hand side of the screen) to grasp the context, dart to the conclusions at the end, and, only if warranted, return to the body of the text to cherry-pick supporting details.

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.

Italo Calvino wrote about this in a single, unalterable sentence: For the prose writer: success consists in39 felicity of verbal expression, which every so often may result from a quick flash of inspiration but as a rule involves a patient search for the mot juste, for the sentence in which every word is unalterable, the most effective marriage of sound and concepts . . . concise, concentrated and memorable.

As the Russian psychologist 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.

small ambivalence that they were now assigning collections of short stories to deal with the shorter attention spans of their students.

Young adults may learn to be less affected when moving from one stimulus to another because they have more fully formed inhibitory systems that, at least in principle, provide the option of overriding continuous distraction. Not so with younger children, whose inhibitory systems and the other executive planning functions in their frontal cortex need a long time to develop. Attention, in the very young, is up for grabs.

Levitin claims that children can become so chronically accustomed to a continuous stream of competitors for their attention that their brains are for all purposes being bathed in hormones such as cortisol and adrenaline, the hormones more commonly associated with fight, flight, and stress. They are only three years old, or four, or sometimes even two and younger—but they are first passively receiving and then, ever so gradually, actively requiring the levels of stimulation of much older children on a regular basis. As Levitin discusses, when children and youth are surrounded with this constant level of novel, sensory stimulation, they are being projected into a continuously hyperattentive state. He suggests that “multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback9 loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.”

Not unlike a growing number of other current researchers, including new work by the developmental psychologists Kathy Hirsh-Pasek22 and Roberta Golinkoff, they found that multiplying distractions within the enhanced e-books often as not impeded comprehension: “The highly enhanced e-book often distracted23 beginning readers from the story narrative. . . . In short too many bells and whistles attached to otherwise engaging technologies were not helpful to building stronger reading skills.”

Physical pages are the underestimated petri dishes of early childhood. Pages give physical substance to cognitive and linguistic repetition and recurrence, which provide the multiple needed exposures to the images and concepts on those pages, which are the earliest entries in the formation of the child’s background knowledge. I want children to experience the physical and temporal thereness of books before they encounter the always slightly removed, slightly ersatz screen.

Joe Frost’s research shows that the radius of children’s activity has shrunk by 90 percent since 1970.19

For example, just as in the first two years, I would have parents and caretakers read to their charges every day and ritualize the reading of stories every night.

Indeed, we humans are a species of storytellers. In his fascinating book 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 rhythm in music and the rhymes of language provide contributions beyond phonemes. Think what happens when you read to a three- or four-year-old child: you automatically begin to speak more clearly and more intentionally. In the process, the prosodic or melodic contour of your voice helps to convey the meanings of words to the child. You change the register of your everyday voice and become someone else. Without ever a thought, you who read to young children are effortlessly accelerating the development of many of the most important parts of the reading circuitry:

Money literally talks in the early language and cognitive development of our children, as demonstrated in the extensive analyses by the University of Chicago economist James Heckman10 and his colleagues. Simply put, the amount of money we invest in the first years of a child’s life produces greater returns for each dollar spent than at any other time in the life span. The implications of all the various types of research on the developing child could not be better understood: society needs to invest in more comprehensive early-childhood programs11 with more highly trained professionals before the first large gaps in language and learning become permanently cemented in the lives of millions of children.

The results highlighted two facts, one unsurprising and one potentially transformative. First, American children bring with them profound cognitive and linguistic differences the first day of formal schooling; not a surprise. Second, these differences fall into fairly discrete groupings that predict how the children will achieve in reading later in school. This could change the trajectories of many children.

The British reading researcher Usha Goswami reinforced this conclusion in a study of reading practices in Europe to establish when reading instruction ideally should begin. She found that in the countries that introduced reading later, reading developed with fewer problems for the children.16 In other words, European children who began instruction in what we would consider first grade acquired reading more easily than those who began a year earlier.

Many years ago, aided by insights by my Swiss friends Thomas and Heidi Bally, I created a naming speed task called the Rapid Alternating Stimulus (RAS) test,5 now used by neuropsychologists and educators to predict and diagnose dyslexia. Basically it asks a person to name a series of fifty well-known items in different categories, specifically letters, numbers, and colors. The person has to switch from one category to the next as fast as possible, which requires both considerable automatized knowledge and a great deal of flexibility. An unexpected finding in the various comparison studies was that bilingual adults were faster on these tasks than were their monolingual peers. Dual-language learners had acquired far more verbal flexibility than single-language learners had.

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. Exemplified by the interactive dynamic that governs our deep-reading processes, only the allocation of time to our inferential and critical analytical functions can transform the information we read into knowledge that can be consolidated in our memory. Only this internalized knowledge, in turn, will allow us to draw analogies with and inferences from new information. The discernment of the truth and value of new information depend on this allocation of time.

During these last moments together, therefore, I ask that you try on what 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.” He used the Latin expression festina lente, which translates as “hurry slowly” or “hurry up slowly,” to underscore the writer’s need to slow time. I use it here to help you experience the third life more consciously: knowing how to quiet the eye and allow your thoughts to settle and be still, poised for what will follow.

Bonhoeffer wrote one of the most moving books I have ever read, Letters and Papers from Prison, after being thrown into concentration camps for his views about Nazi Germany.

We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we’ve created and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful. . . . 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

The atrophy and gradual disuse of our analytical and reflective capacities as individuals are the worst enemies of a truly democratic society, for whatever reason, in whatever medium, in whatever age.

As Nadine Strossen25 writes persuasively in her new book, Hate: Why We Should Resist It with Free Speech, Not Censorship, a democracy succeeds only when the rights, thoughts, and aspirations of all its citizens are respected and given voice and its citizens believe that this is true, regardless of their viewpoint. 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.

The final perquisite of the third reading life is the ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. Indeed, just as Margaret Levi has suggested for the basis of altruism, the combining of our highest intellectual and empathic powers27 with our capacity for virtue may well be why our species has continued. If these capacities are endangered, if good readers are endangered, so are we all. If they are supported, we will have not only an antidote to the weaknesses of a digital culture but a key to propelling our culture’s greatest potential into the future: wise action.