Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is
profound
Maryanne Wolf
When the reading brain skims texts, we don’t have time to
grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings or to perceive beauty. We
need a new literacy for the digital age
‘Multiple studies show that digital screen use may be
causing a variety of troubling downstream effects on reading.
There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with
age: use it or lose it
Sat 25 Aug 2018 14.41 BST Last modified on Thu 20 Dec 2018
21.21 GMT
‘We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate’
reading brain’ Illustration: Sebastien Thibault
Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new
pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on
smartphones; older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents
and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news
feeds. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation
links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s
ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing - a change with implications for
everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of
literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years
ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic
information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly
elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain
enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and
affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and
inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation
of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that
each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move
into digital-based modes of reading.
There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with
age: use it or lose it
This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital
reading and technological innovation. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written,
we do not err as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we disrupt
or diminish while innovating. In this hinge moment between print and digital
cultures, society needs to confront what is diminishing in the expert reading
circuit, what our children and older students are not developing, and what we
can do about it.
We know from research that the reading circuit is not given
to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs
an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment’s
requirements – from different writing systems to the characteristics of
whatever medium is used. If the dominant medium advantages processes that are
fast, multi-task oriented and well-suited for large volumes of information,
like the current digital medium, so will the reading circuit. As UCLA
psychologist Patricia Greenfield writes, the result is that less attention and
time will be allocated to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes, like
inference, critical analysis and empathy, all of which are indispensable to
learning at any age.
The negative effects
of screen reading can appear as early as fourth and fifth grade
Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in
psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and
teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the
classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries because they no longer have
the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less
concerned with students’ “cognitive impatience,” however, than by what may
underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with
a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought
and argument found in more demanding texts, whether in literature and science in
college, or in wills, contracts and the deliberately confusing public
referendum questions citizens encounter in the voting booth.
Multiple studies show that digital screen use may be causing
a variety of troubling downstream effects on reading comprehension in older
high school and college students. In Stavanger, Norway, psychologist Anne
Mangen and her colleagues studied how high school students comprehend the same
material in different mediums. Mangen’s group asked subjects questions about a
short story whose plot had universal student appeal (a lust-filled, love
story); half of the students read Jenny, Mon Amour on a Kindle, the other half
in paperback. Results indicated that students who read on print were superior
in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability
to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.
Ziming Liu from San Jose State University has conducted a
series of studies which indicate that the “new norm” in reading is skimming,
with word-spotting and browsing through the text. Many readers now use an F or
Z pattern when reading in which they sample the first line and then word-spot
through the rest of the text. When the reading brain skims like this, it
reduces time allocated to deep reading processes. In other words, we don’t have
time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive beauty,
and to create thoughts of the reader’s own.
‘Multiple studies show that digital screen use may be
causing a variety of troubling downstream effects on reading.
Karin Littau and Andrew Piper have noted another dimension:
physicality. Piper, Littau and Anne Mangen’s group emphasize that the sense of
touch in print reading adds an important redundancy to information – a kind of
“geometry” to words, and a spatial “thereness” for text. As Piper notes, human
beings need a knowledge of where they are in time and space that allows them to
return to things and learn from re-examination – what he calls the “technology
of recurrence”. The importance of recurrence for both young and older readers
involves the ability to go back, to check and evaluate one’s understanding of a
text. The question, then, is what happens to comprehension when our youth skim
on a screen whose lack of spatial thereness discourages “looking back.”
US media researchers Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine, American
University’s linguist Naomi Baron, and cognitive scientist Tami Katzir from
Haifa University have examined the effects of different information mediums,
particularly on the young. Katzir’s research has found that the negative
effects of screen reading can appear as early as fourth and fifth grade - with
implications not only for comprehension, but also on the growth of empathy.
We need to cultivate
a new kind of brain
The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other
deep reading processes could become the unintended “collateral damage” of our
digital culture is not a simple binary issue about print vs digital reading. It
is about how we all have begun to read on any medium and how that changes not
only what we read, but also the purposes for why we read. Nor is it only about
the young. The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all.
It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It
incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information,
which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false
information and demagoguery.
There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with
age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical
thought in the reading brain because it implies choice. The story of the
changing reading brain is hardly finished. We possess both the science and the
technology to identify and redress the changes in how we read before they
become entrenched. If we work to understand exactly what we will lose,
alongside the extraordinary new capacities that the digital world has brought
us, there is as much reason for excitement as caution.
We need to cultivate a new kind of brain: a “bi-literate”
reading brain capable of the deepest forms of thought in either digital or
traditional mediums. A great deal hangs on it: the ability of citizens in a
vibrant democracy to try on other perspectives and discern truth; the capacity
of our children and grandchildren to appreciate and create beauty; and the
ability in ourselves to go beyond our present glut of information to reach the
knowledge and wisdom necessary to sustain a good society.
Maryanne Wolf is the Director of the Center for Dyslexia,
Diverse Learners, and Social Justice in the Graduate School of Education and
Information Studies at UCLA
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