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.

You need only examine yourself. Perhaps you have already noticed how the quality of your attention has changed the more you read on screens and digital devices. Perhaps you have felt a pang of something subtle that is missing when you seek to immerse yourself in a once favorite book. Like a phantom limb, you remember who you were as a reader, but cannot summon that “attentive ghost” with the joy you once felt in being transported somewhere outside the self to that interior space. It is more difficult still with children, whose attention is continuously distracted and flooded by stimuli that will never be consolidated in their reservoirs of knowledge. This means that the very basis of their capacity to draw analogies and inferences when they read will be less and less developed.

when I was a child learning to read, I did not think about reading. Like Alice, I simply jumped down reading’s hole into Wonderland and disappeared for most of my childhood. When I was a young woman, I did not think about reading. I simply became Elizabeth Bennet, Dorothea Brooke, and Isabel Archer at every opportunity. Sometimes I became men like Alyosha Karamazov, Hans Castorp, and Holden Caulfield. But always I was lifted to places very far from the little town of Eldorado, Illinois, and always I burned with emotions I could never otherwise have imagined.

Even when I was a graduate student of literature, I did not think very much about reading. Rather, I pored over every word, every encrypted meaning in the Duino Elegies4 by Rilke and novels by George Eliot and John Steinbeck, and felt myself bursting with sharpened perceptions of the world and anxious to fulfill my responsibilities within it.

With sudden and complete clarity I saw what would happen if those children could not learn the seemingly simple act of passage into a culture based on literacy. They would never fall down a hole and experience the exquisite joys of immersion in the reading life. They would never discover Dinotopia, Hogwarts, Middle Earth, or Pemberley. They would never wrestle through the night with ideas too large to fit within their smaller worlds. They would never experience the great shift that moves from reading about characters like the Lightning Thief and Matilda to believing they could become heroes and heroines themselves. And most important of all, they might never experience the infinite possibilities within their own thoughts that emerge whole cloth from each fresh encounter with worlds outside their own.

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? Will the mix of continuously stimulating distractions of children’s attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehouses of knowledge or to think critically for themselves?

The implications of our reading brain’s plasticity are neither simple nor transient. The connections between how and what we read and what is written are critically important to today’s society. In a milieu that continuously confronts us with a glut of information, the great temptation for many is to retreat to familiar silos of easily digested, less dense, less intellectually demanding information. The illusion of being informed by a daily deluge of eye-byte-sized information can trump the critical analysis of our complex realities. In Letter Four I confront these issues head-on and discuss how a democratic society depends on the undeterred use of these critical capacities and how quickly they can atrophy in each of us unnoticed.

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.

the good society—embodies each of Aristotle’s three lives, even as the third life, the life of contemplation, is daily threatened in our culture.

in my last and most personal letter, you and I will face ourselves and ask whether we possess each of the three lives of the good reader, or whether, barely noted by us, we have lost the ability to enter our third life and, in so doing, have lost our reading home.

Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the artist in society to that of the canary in the mines: both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us.

My third goal is simply what Proust hoped for each of his readers: It seemed to me that they would not be18 “my readers” but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass. . . . I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves. Sincerely, Your Author

The best-known design principle, neuroplasticity,8 underlies just about everything interesting about reading—from forming a new circuit by connecting older parts, to recycling existing neurons, to adding new and elaborated branches to the circuit over time. Most important for this discussion, however, plasticity also underlies why the reading-brain circuit is inherently malleable (read changeable) and influenced by key environmental factors: specifically, what it reads (both the particular writing system and the content), how it reads (the particular medium, such as print or screen, and its effects on the way we read), and how it is formed (methods of instruction). The crux of the matter is that the plasticity of our brain permits us to form both ever more sophisticated and expanded circuits and also ever less sophisticated circuits, depending on environmental factors.

our words contain and momentarily activate whole repositories of associated meanings, memories, and feelings, even when the exact meaning in a given context is specified. Within this millisecond of recollection, we begin to appreciate the multilayered beauty in the brain’s design for storing and retrieving words: each word can elicit an entire history of myriad connections, associations, and long-stored emotions. Indeed, you have just witnessed how the reading brain activates in half a second something akin to the daily efforts of poets and writers to find the perfect word, the mot juste,26 that will connect, as E. M. Forster once described it, “prose with passion.”

It takes years for deep-reading processes to be formed, and as a society we need to be sure that we are vigilant about their development in our young from a very early age. It takes daily vigilance by us, the expert readers of our society, to choose to expend the extra milliseconds needed to maintain deep reading over time.

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?

Empathy: “Passing Over” into the Perspective of Others Only connect.14 —E. M. Forster

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.

an intimate emotional dimension within the reading experience: the capacity to communicate and to feel with another without moving an inch out of our private worlds.

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, whether as a child when reading Frog and Toad and learning what Toad does when Frog is sick or as an adult when reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Colson Whitehead’s Underground Railroad, or James Baldwin’s I Am Not Your Negro, and experiencing the soul-stealing depravity of slavery and the desperation of those condemned to it or to its legacy. 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. I no longer remember how many times I have read what each of Jane Austen’s heroines felt—Emma, Fanny Price, Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice or in her newest incarnation in Curtis Sittenfeld’s Eligible: A Modern Retelling of Pride and Prejudice. What I know is that each of those characters experienced emotions that helped me understand the range of the often contradictory feelings each of us possesses; doing so leaves us feeling less alone with our particular complex mix of emotions, whatever our life’s circumstances. As expressed in the play Shadowlands, about the life of C. S. Lewis, “We read to know that we are not alone.”

A book was like stepping through a mirror. I could go somewhere else.”

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. And although it is a wonderful thing that movies and film can do some of this, too, there is a difference in the quality of immersion that is made possible by entering the articulated thoughts of others. 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.

Obama told Robinson that the most important things he had learned about being a citizen had come from novels: “It has to do with empathy.23 It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with someone else even though they’re very different from you.”

Developing the deepest forms of reading cannot prevent all such tragedies, but understanding the perspective of other human beings can give ever fresh, varied reasons to find alternative, compassionate ways to deal with the others in our world,

The unsettling reality, however, is that unbeknownst to many of us, including until recently myself, there has begun an unanticipated decline of empathy among our young people.

our technologies place us at a remove, which changes not only who we are as individuals but also who we are with one another. 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.

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.

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. 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.

Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria37 of experiences, information, books we have read. . . . Each life is an encyclopedia, a library. —Italo Calvino

Over the life span, everything we read adds to a reservoir of knowledge that is the basis of our ability to comprehend and to predict whatever we read.

the inestimable importance of the unique background knowledge that comes to us from what we read. I am concerned about both what we read and how we read. Does the content of what we are reading in our present milieu provide us sufficient background knowledge both for the particular demands of life in the twenty-first century and for the formation of the deep-reading brain circuit? 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.

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.

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. We must be able to use our own knowledge base to grasp new information and interpret it with inference and critical analysis. The outline of the alternative is already clear: we will become increasingly susceptible human beings who are more and more easily led by sometimes dubious, sometimes even false information that we mistake for knowledge or, worse, do not care one way or another.

When you read carefully, you are more able to discern what is true and to add to it what you know.

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. Others, too. Without sufficient background knowledge, the rest of the deep-reading processes will be deployed less often, leading to a situation in which many people will never move outside the boundaries of what they already know. For knowledge to evolve, we need to continuously add to our background knowledge. Paradoxically, most factual information today comes from external sources that can be unadjudicated and without proof of any form. How we analyze and use this information and whether we cease to deploy the time-consuming, critical processes to evaluate new information will significantly impact our future. Absent the checks and balances provided by both our prior knowledge content and our analytical processes, we run the risk of digesting information without questioning whether the quality or prioritization of the information available to us is accurate and free from external motivations and prejudices.

It is hardly coincidental that what we think of as the methods of science characterize many of the most sophisticated cognitive processes we deploy during deep reading. Getting to the truth of things—whether in science, in life, or in text—requires observation, hypotheses, and predictions based on inference and deduction, testing and evaluation, interpretation and conclusion, and when possible, new proof of these conclusions through their replication. During the first milliseconds of reading we gather together what we perceive, integrating our observations. Analogical reasoning, as the cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter has written, provides the great bridge between what we see and what we know (background knowledge) and drives us to form new concepts and hypotheses. These hypotheses help guide the application of inferential capacities, such as deduction and induction, and in due course lead to the evaluation and critical analysis of what we think our observations and inferences mean. From these, we draw interpretations of all that went before and, if most fortunate, come to conclusions that lead to bursts of insight. There are both poetry and science at the heart of reading.

On the other hand, if we are reading a poem by Wallace Stevens or an essay by the contemporary philosopher Mark Greif50 in Against Everything, we might well use different forms of inference, as well as a more nuanced range of emotions, than when we are reading . . . well, about motor neurons. Reading, at least all deep reading, requires the use of analogical reasoning and inference if we are to uncover the multiple layers of meaning in what we read.

The more we know, the more we can draw analogies, and the more we can use those analogies to infer, deduce, analyze, and evaluate our past assumptions—all of which increases and refines our growing internal platform of knowledge. The converse is equally true, with harsh implications for our present and future society: the less we know, the fewer possibilities we have for drawing analogies, for increasing our inferential and analytical powers, and for expanding and applying our general knowledge.

Sherlock Holmes provides a masterful example of how careful observation, background knowledge, and analogical reasoning lead to deductions that continue to astonish us.

we often combine inferential capacities with empathy and perspective taking to ferret out the mysteries in what we read.

The consistent strengthening of the connections among our analogical, inferential, empathic, and background knowledge processes generalizes well beyond reading. When we learn to connect these processes over and over in our reading, it becomes easier to apply them to our own lives, teasing apart our motives and intentions and understanding with ever greater perspicacity and, perhaps, wisdom, why others think and feel the way they do. Not only is it the basis for the compassionate side of empathy, but it also contributes to strategic thinking.

these strengthened processes do not come without work and practice, nor do they remain static if unused. From start to finish, the basic neurological principle—“Use it or lose it”—is true for each deep-reading process.

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 kn...

“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.”

threats to critical thinking. The first threat comes when any powerful framework for understanding our world (such as a political or religious view) becomes so impenetrable to change and so rigidly adhered to that it obfuscates any divergent type of thought, even when the latter is evidence-based or morally based. The second threat that Edmundson observes is the total absence of any developed personal belief system in many of our young people, who either do not know enough about past systems of thought (e.g., contributions by Sigmund Freud, Charles Darwin, or Noam Chomsky) or who are too impatient to examine and learn from them. As a result, their ability to learn the kind of critical thinking necessary for deeper understanding can become stunted. Intellectual rudderlessness and adherence to a way of thought that allows no questions are threats to critical thinking in us all.

Critical analysis in its deepest forms, therefore, represents the best possible integration of past hard-sought thoughts and feelings, which is the single best preparation for a whole new understanding.

The theologian John Dunne used “quiet eye” to describe what humans need to suffuse love with knowledge. Contemporary golfers use the term to describe a method of improving their concentration; I wonder if professional golfers realize the poetry behind their swings. I employ “quiet eye” to crystallize both my worries and my hopes for the reader of the twenty-first century—whose eye increasingly will not stay still; whose mind darts like a nectar-driven hummingbird from one stimulus to another; whose “quality of attention”5 is slipping imperceptibly with consequences none could have predicted.