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

by Maryanne Wolf

attention is continuously distracted and flooded by stimuli that will never be consolidated in their reservoirs of knowledge.

This

that the very basis of their capacity to draw analogies and inferences when they read will be less and less developed. Young reading brains are evolving without a ripple of concern by most people, even though more and more of our youths are not reading other than what...

processes over others. 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.

We human beings have to learn to read. That means we must have an environment that helps us to develop and connect a complex assortment of basic and not-so-basic processes, so that every young brain can form its own brand-new reading circuit.

This final image of the reading brain’s connectedness conveys that at least as many things are happening in zigzagging, feed-forward, and feed-backward interactivity as are occurring linearly.28 Indeed, such an impression would be the closest approximation of the many unknowns that remain about the timing and sequence of all that goes on between and among the rings of Vision, Language, Cognition, Motor, and Affect when we read. We are left at the top of our circus tent humbled by the enormity of what makes up this reading act—which most humans take completely for granted.

process of encounter and perspective taking in reading as the act of “passing over,”

we enter into the feelings, imaginings, and thoughts of others through a particular kind of empathy:

in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally.

Perspective taking not only connects our sense of empathy with what we have just read but also expands our internalized knowledge of the

Through this consciousness-changing dimension of the act of reading, we learn to feel what it means to be despairing and hopeless or ecstatic and consumed with unspoken feelings.

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.

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

when we read fiction, the brain actively simulates the consciousness of another person, including those whom we would never otherwise even imagine knowing. It allows us to try on, for a few moments, what it truly means to be another person, with all the similar and sometimes vastly different emotions and struggles that govern others’ lives. The reading circuitry is elaborated by such simulations; so also our daily lives, and so also the lives of those who would lead others.

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.

Many first-grade readers might be able to decode Hemingway’s six-word story, but they would not have the background knowledge

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.

The relationship between what we read and what we know will be fundamentally altered by too early and too great a reliance on external knowledge.

From start to finish, the basic neurological principle—“Use it or lose it”—is true for each deep-reading process. More important still, this principle holds for the whole plastic reading-brain circuit. 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 concentration of attention allows us to hold a word, a sentence, a passage in such a manner that we can move through multiple processes to all the layers of meaning, form, and feeling that enhance our lives.

Are we as a society beginning to lose the quality of attention necessary to give time to the essential human faculties that make up and sustain deep reading? If the answer is yes, what can we do?

The iPad is the new pacifier.

Over the last ten years we have changed in how much we read, how we read, what we read, and why we read with a “digital chain” that connects the links among them all and extracts a tax we have only begun to tally.

Half of the students read Jenny, Mon Amour on a Kindle, the other half in a paperback book. The results indicated that the students who read the book were superior to their screen-reading peers in their ability to reconstruct the plot in chronological order. In other words, the sequencing of the sometimes easily overlooked details in a fictional story appeared to be lost by the students who were reading on a digital screen.

We use working memory to hold information for a short time so that we can attend to it and manipulate it for a cognitive function—for example, holding numbers “in mind” for a math problem, letters while decoding a word, or words in brief memory while reading a sentence.

Aristotle wrote that a good society has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment within the Greeks’ special understanding of leisure4; and finally, the life of contemplation.5 So, too, 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