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12 LISTENER OCTOBER 13 2018DEAR
READER
Our brain development is being put at risk by the
sheer volume of reading we are doing online and on digital devices. by SALLY BLUNDELLLITERACY THREAT“There is a large
number of us who
didn’t pick up a
book at all, or read
fewer than three
in the past year.”
for different measures including emo-
tional response, reading time and text
comprehension. The researchers found
no significant differences between the
paperback and Kindle readers, save one:
people who read on paper were nearly
twice as good at putting 14 plot events
in the right order.
Worryingly, Wolf points to a more recent
study that found students who read on digi-
tal media don’t comprehend as well, don’t
sequence details as well and don’t recall
the plot as well as those reading the same
material in print. According to Mangen col-
laborators Karin Littau and Andrew Piper,
the sense of touch made possible with a
printed book also gives a kind of geom-
etry to words, a spatial “thereness” to the
text that adds to the comprehension and
memory of the written word.
A European research network studying
the effects of digital text
reading said the amount
of time spent reading
long-form texts is in
decline, and “due to
digitisation, reading is
becoming more intermit-
tent and fragmented”.
Ziming Liu, professor of
library and information
science at San José State University, was the
first to identify a “new norm” in reading –
on screen, people tend to scan, zero in on
keywords and read in a less linear fashion.Y
our brain has been in
training for 6000 years
to read this article. It was
then, about six millennia
ago, reports neuroscien-
tist Maryanne Wolf, that
the acquisition of literacy
demanded the develop-ment of new brain circuitry. Since then,
that new wiring has evolved from being able
to perform simple decoding steps, such as
being able to count goats in a herd, into the
present sophisticated reading brain.
As a species, we are not natural-bornreaders. As Wolf noted in her 2007 book
Proust and the Squid, the act of learning
to read “added an entirely new circuit to
our hominid brain’s repertoire. The long
developmental process of learning to read
deeply, and well, changed the very struc-
ture of that circuit’s connections, which
rewired the brain, which
transformed the nature of
human thought.”
Now these “deep-read-ing” processes – the ability
to apply critical analysis,
empathy and imagination,
to discern truth, gauge
inference and appreciate
beauty – are under threat.
As Wolf writes in her evocatively titled new
book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain
in a Digital World, the greatest explosion of
creativity, invention and discovery in our
history, our almost complete transition to
a digital culture, is changing the way we
absorb and retain information in ways we
never imagined.
“When we are reading in print, we have
time to allocate to those kinds of cogni-
tive processes,” she tells the Listener from
her office at the University of California,
Los Angeles, where she is a visiting pro-
fessor. “By and large, reading on a screen
encourages multitasking, a different form of
attention, a different speed of processing.”
And increasingly, she says, researchshows our habitual browsing of the inter-
net, or flicking from email to text to
Twitter feed, is affecting how we read.
Wolf cites a 2014 study led by reading
researcher Anne Mangen from the
University of Stavanger, Norway, in
which 50 graduate students read a
28-page story. Half of the students
read the story on a Kindle, the other
half read the same story in paper-
back. They were then tested
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