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.

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?

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.

The neuroscientist David Eagleman recently wrote3 that the brain’s cells are “connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. . . . there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissues as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.”

A large, fundamental mistake—with many unfortunate consequences for children, teachers, and parents around the world—is the assumption that reading is natural to human beings and that it will simply emerge “whole cloth” like language when the child is ready. This is not the case; most of us7 must be taught the basic principles of this unnatural cultural invention.

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?

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.

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.

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.

For knowledge to evolve, we need to continuously add to our background knowledge.

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.

I read both to find fresh reason to love this world and also to leave this world behind—to enter a space where I can glimpse what lies beyond my imagination, outside my knowledge and my experience of life, and sometimes, like the poet Federico García Lorca, where I can “go very far, to give me back my ancient soul of a child.”

everything counts for something when you read to your child. There is almost no end of good in what you are contributing to the various components of the reading-brain circuit.

When you read to your children, you are exposing them to multiple representations—of the sounds or phonemes in spoken words, of the visual forms of letters and letter patterns in written words, of the meanings of oral and written words, and so on across every circuit component. The young brain is setting down re-presentations of this information every time the child hears, sees, touches, smells books.

Before two years of age, human interaction and physical interaction with books and print are the best entry into the world of oral and written language and internalized knowledge, the building blocks of the later reading circuit.

The enduring legacy of childhood’s stories may begin with the simple magic woven by them, but the understanding of “others” imparted by them will stretch across the life span and, if we are all very fortunate, influence how the next generation treats its fellow inhabitants on our shared planet.

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.

If we as a society want to build learning environments that promote a biliterate brain, we have to step up to the plate and deal with three large issues. First, from my perspective as a scientist, we need to invest in a great deal more research about the cognitive impacts of both print and digital mediums on all our children, particularly those with reading challenges, whether environmental or biological in origin. Second, from my perspective as an educator, we need to invest in more comprehensive professional training. Most teachers (a full 82 percent)20 have never been given training in the best uses of technology for children from kindergarten to grade four, much less how to teach good online reading skills to different kinds of learners. Third, from my perspective as a citizen, we must confront the access gaps that exist in our society and the world and work to eliminate them.

To read, we need a certain kind of silence . . . 1 that seems increasingly elusive in our over-networked society . . . and it is not contemplation we desire but an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape, knowledge can’t help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive, with its promise that speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react than to think deeply. . . . 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

the “good reader.” There is the first life of the good reader in gathering information and acquiring knowledge. We are awash in this life. There is the second life, in which reading’s varied forms of entertainment are to be found in abundance: the sheer distraction and exquisite pleasure of immersion—in stories of other lives; in articles about mysterious, newly discovered exoplanets; in poems that steal our breath away. Whether we choose to escape in bodice-ripping romances; enter the painstakingly re-created worlds in novels by Kazuo Ishiguro, Abraham Verghese, or Elena Ferrante; exercise our wits in mysteries by John Irving or in biographies of saints by G. K. Chesterton or of presidents by Doris Kearns Goodwin; or discover our species’ epic genetic journey with Siddhartha Mukherjee or Yuval Noah Harari, we read to take this most economic transport away from our frantically pursued everyday lives. The third life of the good reader is the culmination of reading and the terminus of the other two lives: the reflective life, in which—whatever genre we are reading—we enter a totally invisible, personal realm, our private “holding ground”6 where we can contemplate all manner of human existence and ponder a universe whose real mysteries dwarf any of our imagination.

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.

My hope for my children and my children’s children and yours is that they, like Bonhoeffer, will know where to find the many forms of joy that reside in the secret holding places in the reading life and the sanctuary it gives each of us who seeks it.

By now you realize that the deep-reading brain is both a real, flesh-and-cranial-bone reality and a metaphor for the continuous expansion of human intelligence and virtue. If sometimes I am too fearful about short-circuiting it in future generations, I simultaneously hope and trust in this circuit’s pluripotential capacities to embody all of our species’ exponentially growing intellectual, affective, and moral faculties. This is our generation’s hinge moment: the time when we decide to take the true measure of our lives. If we act wisely at this cultural, cognitive crossroads, I believe, not unlike what Charles Darwin34 hoped for our species’ future, that we will forge ever more elaborated reading-brain circuits capable of “endless forms most beautiful.”