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

by Maryanne Wolf

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.