Maryanne Wolf, London, Aug 25 2018<\/p>\n
When the reading brain skims texts, we don\u2019t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another\u2019s feelings or to perceive beauty. We need a new literacy for the digital age<\/em><\/p>\n L<\/span><\/span>ook around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers.\u00a0Younger school-aged\u00a0children read stories on smartphones; older boys don\u2019t read\u00a0at 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\u2019s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing – a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.<\/p>\n As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species\u2019 brain more than 6,000 years ago.\u00a0That circuit\u00a0evolved from a very simple\u00a0mechanism\u00a0for decoding basic information,\u00a0like the number of goats\u00a0in one\u2019s herd, to the present,\u00a0highly 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 \u201cdeep reading\u201d processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.<\/p>\n This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital reading and technological innovation. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle\u00a0has written, we do not\u00a0err\u00a0as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish\u00a0while 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.<\/p>\n We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language;\u00a0it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment\u2019s requirements \u2013 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\u00a0are indispensable to\u00a0learning at any age.<\/p>\n