Deep Reading Brain, RIP

I first started thinking about this question back in 2009 when I heard a talk by James Bowman. You can read the talk here—highly recommended; it is one of the most memorable talks I have ever heard. Bowman began with the arresting statement, “You might not know it to look at me, but I used to be pretty smart.” He explains:

Intuitively, however, I feel that my time spent online has robbed me of at least some of my powers of concentration, and I believe that a very significant component, if not the principal one, of intelligence is the power of concentration. Or, to put it the other way around, stupidity is the inability to focus, and my ability to focus has become severely compromised. 

Bowman, the media critic for The New Criterion, spends a lot of time reading things online. A lot of time. So do you (like right now, for example…). So do I.

Maryanne Wolf has a book about the phenomenon: Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World. It is the study of the science of the reading brain. People have been doing all these brain studies where they watch which parts of the brain light up and we now know a lot about how the reading brain works. I really wanted to love this book. (More about that anon.)

Wolf begins starkly: “human beings were never born to read.” Reading is an acquired skill, a rather important acquired skill: “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.” The way in which humans learn how to read has a radical influence on the way the brain develops, which has a huge impact on the way the brain works.

The young reader can either develop all the multiple deep-reading 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

In other words, how we read is rather important in determining the shape of our existence in the future.

Wolf is particularly alarmed by the slow death of “deep reading.” “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?” Learning how to read in a digital age does not involve developing “cognitive patience.”

What develops instead is “continuous partial attention.” Look around and you can instantly see that. It more than just having multiple browser windows open simultaneously. It is the loss of an ability to only have one browser window open. You can see it vividly in a college classroom these days. A not insignificant portion of the students have a nearly impossible time focusing on the class; they literally don’t know how to do only one thing at a time and concentrate on that one thing. When I assign books to read, I know in advance that a portion of the class literally has never developed the ability to sit in a quiet room with just a book and read it. They have never had to do that in their lives. The question is whether this will move from being a minority of the class to a majority of the class to almost the entire class in the future.

The science of reading is pretty clear. For example, if you give two sets of students the same reading assignment, but some read it in a physical book and some read it electronically, the students with the physical book have a much higher comprehension. This applies to novels, for example: students with the physical book have a higher ability to do something as simple as remember the plot of the novel in chronological order. Given the choice between reading a physical textbook and an electronic textbook, it is not even close which you should choose if you want to learn the subject.

It is not that you can’t learn anything in an electronic reading environment; it is simply that you will not learn things as deeply or as well. Your attention flitters hither and yon, picking up a bit here and a bit there. This has an effect on cognition; screen readers do not develop the ability for sustained thought and attention.

What are the consequences of this change in the reading brain? Well, this is where I really wanted to like this book. James Bowman pointed to all of the above in his talk back in 2009. Here I have a book published a decade later purporting to be an examination of the science on the matter, and while it confirms Bowman’s autobiographical account, the evidence in this book turns out to be primarily a larger collection of anecdotes with a few studies tossed in. On the question of what the future reading brain will be like, the book has nothing to offer. We don’t know what the next generation’s cognitive pathways will create.

As a result, the book ends with a question mark. We know what the Deep Reading Brain is and has done. We know the Deep Reading Brain is dying off and may not exist in the next generation. Is the development of the Electronic Reading Brain an evolutionary advance or regression? In order to lament the loss of deep reading, that seems to be a pretty important question. Wolf clearly thinks it is a regression; I do too. But it would have been nice if this book had more to offer that simply saying that Wolf doesn’t like the way things are headed.