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

by Maryanne Wolf

But what if our capacity to perceive is actually decreasing because we are confronted with too much information, as the philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote? What if we have become virtually addicted to the heightened sensory stimulation that composes much of our daily lives and cannot stop ourselves from pursuing it incessantly,

confronts two central questions with implications far beyond any answer available now: 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?

contemporary environments bombard us constantly with new sensory stimuli, as we splice our attention across multiple digital devices most of our days and, as often as not, nights shortened by our attention to them. A recent study by Time Inc.9 of the media habits of people in their twenties indicated that they switched media sources twenty-seven times an hour. On average they now check their cell phone between 150 and 190 times a day. As a society, we are continuously distracted by our environment,

We do not see or hear with the same quality of attention, because we see and hear too much, become habituated, and then seek still more.

Hyperattention is one of the inevitable by-products of this confluence. The literary critic Katherine Hayles characterized hyperattention10 as a phenomenon caused by (and then adding to the need for) rapid task switching, high...

continuous partial attention12 to capture the way children attend to their digital devices and then to their environments. Since that time, these devices have multiplied in number and ubiquity, including for the very young. A quick glance around you on your next plane trip will provide sufficient data for this observation. The iPad is the new pacifier.

the more constant the digital stimulation, the more prevalent the boredom and ennui expressed by even very young children when we take the devices away. Further, the more the devices are used, the more dependent the entire family becomes on longer periods of access to digital sources of entertainment, information, and distraction by all its members.

From the minute we awaken to the alarm on one digital device, through attention-switching checks in fifteen-minute-or-less intervals on multiple other devices throughout the day, to the last minutes before we sleep when we perform our final, “virtuous” sweep of email to prepare for the next day, we inhabit a world of distraction.14

Behind our screens, at work and at home, we have sutured the temporal segments of our days so as to switch our attention from one task or one source of stimulation to another. We cannot but be changed. And we are—in ways you have begun to sense. 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.

information is continuously perceived as a form of entertainment at the surface level, it remains on the surface, potentially impeding real thinking, rather than deepening it. Recall the imaging study in which the brains22 of Natalie Phillips’s literature students showed less activation for casual reading than for deep or close reading. Reading light becomes one more entertaining distraction, however cleverly “masquerading as being in the know,”23 as Ulin notes.

What do we do with the cognitive overload from multiple gigabytes of information from multiple devices? First, we simplify. Second, we process the information as rapidly as possible; more precisely, we read more in briefer bursts. Third, we triage. We stealthily begin the insidious trade-off between our need to know with our need to save and gain time. Sometimes we outsource our intelligence to the information outlets that offer the fastest, simplest, most digestible distillations of information we no longer want to think about ourselves. And just as in many a translation from one language to another, things go missing—from the slackened use of our own individual analytic powers to a culture in which complex ideas are no longer the dominant currency. When we retreat from the intrinsic complexity of human life for whatever reason, often as not we turn to what conforms to the narrowing confines of what we already know, never shaking or testing that base, never looking outside the boundaries of our past thought with all its earlier assumptions and sometimes dormant but ready-to-pounce prejudices.

the observed tendency in screen reading to encourage skimming, skipping, and browsing, and also to the screen’s intrinsic lack of a book’s concrete, spatial dimension, which tells us where things are.

There is a very old concept called a set in psychological research that helps explain the less linear, less sequenced, and potentially less nuanced ways many of us are now reading, regardless of medium. When we read for hours on a screen whose characteristics involve a rapid speed of information processing, we develop an unconscious set toward reading based on how we read during most of our digital-based hours. If most of those hours involve reading on the distraction-saturated Internet, where sequential thinking is less important and less used, we begin to read that way even when we turn off the screen and pick up a book or newspaper.

his book The Shallows, Nicholas Carr reminds us of a concern34 raised by Stanley Kubrick that in a digital culture we should not be worrying so much about whether the computer will become like us, but whether we will become like it.

Like insight, the perception of beauty, whether in reading or in art, emerges out of many of the same capacities that compose deep reading. And, like insight, only the time we give to those capacities allows our perception of beauty to “father forth”42 long enough for us to see, recognize, and understand more. For just as reading is not solely visual, beauty is not simply about the senses. In her essay “Decline,” Marilynne Robinson wrote that beauty among other important things is a “strategy of emphasis.43 If it is not recognized, the text is not understood.” Beauty helps us attend to what is most important. If our perception of beauty becomes reduced to skimming like a water strider across the thin surface of words, we will miss the depths below; we will never be led by beauty to learn and understand what lies beneath.

The future of language is linked both to the sustained efforts by writers to find those words that direct us to their hard-won thought and to the sustained efforts by readers to reciprocate by applying their best thought to what is read. I worry that we are one quick step removed from recognizing the beauty in what is written. I worry that we are even closer to the stripping away of complex thoughts when they do not fit the memory-enfeebling restriction on the number of characters used to convey them. Or when they are buried in the last, least read, twentieth page of a Google search.

What, then, will be the fate, he asked, of books and poems filled with metaphors and analogies whose referents are no longer shared knowledge? What would happen if a culture’s shared repertoire of allusions—metaphors from the Bible, myths, and fables; remembered lines of poems; characters from stories—begins to shrink and gradually disappear? What will happen, this learned publisher, who reads in multiple languages, asked, if the “language of books” no longer fits the culture’s cognitive style—fast, heavily visual, and artificially truncated? Will writing change and with it the reader, the writer, the publisher, language itself? Are we each witnessing in our different professions the beginning of a retreat from more intellectually demanding forms of language

Words, stories, books allowed me to have not so much a quiet eye—never, perhaps, my forte when I was young—but a widened gaze at worlds I could never have imagined from my very small vantage point over Walnut Street, where I met Emily Dickinson, Charlotte Brontë, and Margaret Mitchell for the first time. As Alberto Manguel remarked about his own similarly book-built knowledge store, “Everything proceeds in geometric progression based49 on what is known and what is remembered every time we read something new.”

The issue, therefore, is never just about how many words we consume or even how we read in the digital culture. It is about the significant effects of how much we read upon how we read and the effects of both upon what we read and remember. It does not end, however, with what we read, but rather continues on, as what we read further changes the next link in the chain, how things are written.

TL; DR (Too long; didn’t read). The critical relationship between the quality of reading and the quality of thought is influenced heavily by changes in attention and what I have called, more intuitively than scientifically, cognitive patience. Some of the more disconcerting and surprising letters I have received over the last years have come from professors of literature and the social sciences who are flummoxed over their college students’ impatience with older, denser American literature and writing. One chair of a well-known English department wrote that he could no longer teach his once sought-after seminar on Henry James because too few students today wanted or were able to read James. Among those professors, the most frequent observations are two. The first is that students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly averse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis. The second is that student writing is deteriorating. I have, to be sure, heard this criticism of undergraduates as long as I have been teaching. The question is nevertheless important for every age to confront. In our epoch, we must ask whether current students’ diminishing familiarity with conceptually demanding prose and the daily truncating of their writing on social media is affecting their writing in more negative ways than in the past. There are two issues that may also be rela...

the background knowledge, argumentation, and supporting evidence found in the body of most resources has gone either skimmed or largely unread. Such a mode of reading will eventually find its way into less well constructed and less persuasively supported writing by students who are conceptually skimming in both their reading and their writing.

it may come back to a lack of cognitive patience with demanding critical analytic thinking and a concomitant failure to acquire the cognitive persistence, what the psychologist Angela Duckworth famously called “grit,”54 nurtured by the very genres being avoided.

These are the very intellectual skills and personal attributes that provide young adults with the most important foundation for being able to recognize and manage the unavoidable changes and complexities ahead of them. Their development in the college years prepares them for the far more challenging forms of intellectual tenacity required of them after graduation: whether it is to write well-argued reports, documents, and briefs in their future professional lives; to critically read and evaluate the worth of a referendum, a court decision, medical documents, wills, investigative journalism, or a political candidate’s personal record; or even to differentiate truth from falsehood in the escalating issues around false news and reports. A democratic society requires the careful development of these abilities in its citizens, both young and old.

How our citizens think, decide, and vote depends on their collective ability to navigate the complex realities of a digital milieu with intellects not just capable of, but accustomed to higher-level understanding and analysis. It is no longer only a matter of which medium is better for what; it is a question of how the optimal mode of thought in our children and our young adults and ourselves can be fostered in this moment of history.

Like everyone else, with increasing responsibilities in my professional and personal lives and an ever-increasing load of what I had to read and write in any given day on any number of digital mediums, I began to make little compromises. I still tried to use email more like a note in an envelope—a social greeting with its own forms of politeness. But every note was becoming shorter and terser. There was no waiting for the perfect moment to write tranquil thoughts, the admittedly elusive goal of my former style. I just did my best at any given moment and hoped for cosmic forgiveness for failing to meet the projected expectations of the recipients of all my communications.

I still bought many books, but more and more I read in them, rather than being whisked away by them. At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported. With that unwelcome realization, I stopped in my own version of suspended disbelief: Was it possible that I had become the reader for whom I was losing my weekends writing about and indeed for?

my neatly alphabetized bookshelf, the one filled with the books that had largely formed who I am and how I think. It scarcely mattered that I had failed my own test. No one would care or know but me. No one would be the wiser. As for any wisdom on my own part, the inescapable conclusion—which I had no intention of sharing with anyone else—was that I had changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration; I was impatient with the number of clauses and phrases per sentence, as if I had never reverentially encountered the much longer sentences of Proust and Thomas Mann; I was completely offended by the number of words Hesse felt necessary to use in every other sentence; and finally, my so-called deep-reading processes never “surfaced.” There. I had changed.

failures, like enemies, can be our best teachers, if we can see them as opportunities for recognizing what we need to change. With the reading equivalent of “gritting one’s teeth,” I forced myself to return to task, but this time for mercifully brief, concentrated, twenty-minute intervals.

It took two weeks. Somewhere near the end of that many days, I experienced a much less dramatic form of St. Paul of Tarsus’s epiphany. No flash of light or brilliant insight. I simply felt, at last, that I was home again, returned to my former reading self. The pace of my reading now matched the pace of action in the book. I slowed down or speeded up with it. I no longer imposed upon Hesse’s words and clause-lined sentences either the speed or the spasmodic quality of attention that I had unconsciously grown accustomed to in my online reading style.

each age at which we read brings a different person to the text. In my case, only when I forced myself to enter the book did I experience, first, slowing down; second, becoming immersed in the other world in the book; and third, being lifted out of my own. During the process, my world slowed down—just a little—as I recovered my lost way of reading.

my grafted, spasmodic, online style, while appropriate for much of my day’s ordinary reading, had been transferred indiscriminately to all of my reading, rendering my former immersion in more difficult texts less and less satisfying. I did not go further and test my comprehension for possible changes. I will admit that I did not want to know that. I simply wanted to regain what I had almost lost.

What would now become of the reader I had been? There is a very simple, very beautiful Native American story I have always remembered. In this story a grandfather is telling his young grandson about life. He tells the little boy that in every person there are two wolves, who live in one’s breast and who are always at war with each other. The first wolf is very aggressive and full of violence and hate toward the world. The second wolf is peaceful and full of light and love. The little boy anxiously asks his grandfather which wolf wins. The grandfather replies, “The one you feed.”

It is within the context of feeding the “second wolf” that I tell you the real denouement of my experiment in rereading Hesse: I read Magister Ludi a third time. Not for any experimental reason, simply for the peace I felt in returning to my former reading life. The novelist Allegra Goodman65 wrote something wonderful about the process of unfolding that occurs in rereading a beloved book: “Like pleated fabric, the text reveals different parts . . . at different times. And yet every time the text unfolds, . . . the reader adds new wrinkles. Memory and experience press themselves into each reading so that each encounter informs the next.” Each time I reread the book, I remembered something essential about the person I had thought I was when I had first read Hesse. By the end I had recaptured both why I had read the book with such joy then and, ironically perhaps, what reading had meant to me before I had become a reading researcher.

There may well be as many reasons why we read as there are readers. But the very raising to consciousness of the question why we read has elicited some of the most thought-provoking responses by some of the world’s most beloved writers. I would ask you to raise it for yourself before more time passes.

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, whe...

Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses; every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others. Although . . . the Internet may develop impressive visual intelligence, the cost seems to be deep processing: mindful knowledge acquisition, inductive analysis, critical thinking, imagination, and reflection. —Patricia Greenfield2

Will the time-consuming, cognitively demanding deep-reading processes atrophy or be gradually lost within a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, immediacy, high levels of stimulation, multitasking, and large amounts of information?

As the UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield demonstrates in her work, the basic, commonsense principle is that the more exposure to (time spent with) any medium, the more the characteristics of the medium (affordances) will influence the characteristics of the viewer (learner).4 The medium is the messenger to the cortex, and it begins to shape it from the very start.

what will happen to the development of their attention, memory, and background knowledge—processes known to be affected in adults by multitasking, rapidity, and distraction? Second, if they are affected, will such changes alter the makeup of the resulting expert reading circuit and/or the motivation to form and sustain deep-reading capacities? Finally, what can we do to address the potential negative effects of varied digital media on reading without losing their immensely positive contributions to children and to society?

Attention and Memory in the Age of Distraction

such attention-flitting, task-switching behavior within the context of our evolutionary reflex, the novelty bias that pulls our attention immediately toward anything new: “Humans will work just as hard to obtain8 a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate. . . . In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one.”

when children and youth are surrounded with this constant level of novel, sensory stimulation, they are being projected into a continuously hyperattentive state. He suggests that “multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback9 loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.”

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.

before most of us possess an inkling that babies could be listening to us, infants are making astonishing connections between listening to human voices and developing their language system. Think how much more can happen in those regions when parents slowly, deliberately read to their children, just to them, with mutually focused attention.

For more than four decades, one of the single most important predictors12 of later reading achievement has been how much parents read to their child. There are by now a spate of excellent initiatives around the world urging parents to do this, such as the US pediatricians’ highly successful Reach Out and Read13 campaign begun by the pediatricians Barry Zuckerman and Perri Klass; the Italian Born to Read14 project; and Judy Koch’s successful Bring Me a Book15 program in California and China.

God made Man because He loves stories.18 —Elie Wiesel

stories and fairy tales that will reappear over and over in their later school years. These are the stories that prepare them for their culture and teach them lifelong lessons: what it means to be a hero, a villain, or a redoubtable princess; what it means to be kind to others; how it feels when someone is unfair and unjust. The universal moral laws every culture possesses begin with stories. Indeed, we humans are a species of storytellers. In his fascinating book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall hypothesizes from a literary perspective that stories help our children and indeed all of us “practice reacting to the kinds of challenges20 that are, and always were, most crucial to our success as a species.” Such a thought is an expansion of something21 that the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker also speculated upon with his argument that stories, not unlike remembered bridge or chess moves, help us face similar difficulties in life armed with possible strategies for solving them.

Only a proficient reading level will ensure that an individual can go on to develop and apply the sophisticated reading skills that will maintain the intellectual, social, physical, and economic health of our country. Two-thirds or more of future US citizens are not even close.

society needs to invest in more comprehensive early-childhood programs11 with more highly trained professionals before the first large gaps in language and learning become permanently cemented in the lives of millions of children.

Over the last half century our society has gradually handed over to teachers, arguably its most idealistic members, all the ills that society itself could not “fix,” particularly the pernicious effects of poverty and stressful environments on early child development. Every school community should watch the documentary The Raising of America,18 by the filmmaker Christine Herbes-Sommers, for an honest, astringent accounting of how these effects last a lifetime.