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

by Maryanne Wolf

a positive aspect is simultaneously emerging: the growing ability of digitally raised youth to deal, at least under some circumstances, with moving their attention across multiple streams of information without diminished performance. There is by now a long and complicated body of research on task switching or attention switching, usually conducted with adults. Although previous studies by Poldrack and others have provided compelling evidence of the inability of most humans to switch without considerable “brain costs”18 (i.e., to their ability to process anything in depth), one of Poldrack’s recent studies indicates that digitally raised youth can do this if they have been trained sufficiently in one of the tasks. If our children become far better than most adults at handling multiple sources of information, they will possess skills increasingly important for many future jobs.