Reading is unnatural. This will hardly come as a surprise to any child trying to put off his homework for just one more hour of watching other kids play Minecraft. Yet there really are implications worth considering if we accept that our cognitive systems didn’t evolve to process text in the same way as they evolved to handle vision and speech. Speaking on an evolutionary historical scale, “we haven’t had enough time to develop a dedicated reading brain,” says UCLA neuroscientist Rebecca Gotlieb in the BBC World Service video above. For the time being, in a kind of cognitive jerry-rigging, “we co-opt parts of the brain involved in vision and auditory processing and language and attention and affect.”
That was true for readers and writers of Sumerian cuneiform and Egyptian hieroglyphics five millennia ago. It still is for readers and writers of the many scripts in use today, from the Latin alphabet to Chinese characters to the Arabic abjad, each of which has its own influence on its users’ neurological architecture. One of the biggest differences between then and now is the scale of reading: ancient Sumeria and Egypt seem to have had literacy rates around one percent, a number comprising mostly scribes, priests, and nobles, while the global average today comes in around 88 percent and rising. Another is the medium of reading: the shift from papyrus to paper may have seemed remarkable at the time, but the more recent one from paper to electronic screens has already changed the way we think about our world.
“When we read on screens, we tend to skim, and when we skim, we’re more susceptible to misinformation,” says Gotlieb. So we’ve been told, many times and many ways, amid the past decade’s ever-more-troubled political reportage. In 2018, Maryanne Wolf, author of Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, argued in the Guardian that the “subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy” apparently caused by technology-encouraged skimming “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.”
So much for us adults. What about the children? In the BBC World Service video, Wolf bluntly sums up the results of studies so far on the effects of early reading experience on later intellectual performance: “the more digital, the worse academic.” If a young brain is “constantly being distracted and hyperstimulated, you’re going to have them not able to really move from one stimulus to the next without a desire for ever-quicker intervals between stimuli.” For our part, as parents, teachers, or other visible examples of grown-uphood, we can do nothing to counteract that more effectively than to model and enjoy a rich “reading life” for the next generation. We must, in other words, pick up books and not put them down, which may strike an Open Culture reader as an easy task. But ask yourself this: how many times did you click over to something else before getting to the end of this post?
Related content:
This Is Your Brain on Jane Austen: The Neuroscience of Reading Great Literature
Why Americans Stopped Reading Books
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. He’s the author of the newsletter Books on Cities as well as the books 한국 요약 금지 (No Summarizing Korea) and Korean Newtro. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.
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