Changes in the reading brain

When language and thought atrophy, when complexity wanes and everything becomes more and more the same, we run great risks in society politic — whether from extremists in a religion or a political organization or, less obviously, from advertisers.

Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

In her 2018 book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, Maryanne Wolf cites a number of scientific studies indicating that while people may be reading more each day on their smartphones and computers than ever before, their ability to comprehend what they're reading has decreased. They can't stay focused on one thing for long. Their reading usually involves a lot of skimming and skipping, not concentration on a single subject.

Yet what really convinced Wolf was when she tried to reread Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi, a novel she had loved when she was in college. Now she found it difficult to focus her attention on it for more than a page or two at a time. "The rapid speed to which I had become accustomed while reading my daily gigabytes of material did not allow me to slow down enough to grasp whatever Hesse was conveying," she writes.

If Wolf, an authority on reading and former director of the Tufts Center for Reading and Language Research, finds this to be true, imagine how true it must be for the rest of us, and especially for children who spend much of their day on computers, even while in the classroom.

Children and their education are major concerns of Wolf, who is also an expert on dyslexia. She is a big believer in reading to children, including those too young to actually understand what is being read to them. She is enough of a realist to know that turning back the clock on the digital age is not possible, but she does advocate for exploring ways to use computers to increase, rather than decrease, attention spans.

The implications of this dumbing down of readers of all ages are vast. "Sometimes we outsource our intelligence to the information outlets that offer the fastest, simplest, most digestible distillations of information we no longer want to think about ourselves," she says. It was once thought that the Internet would make possible an even greater diversity of thought and ideas, yet as sites such as Google, Facebook and YouTube have become more powerful and have begun to censor ideas they disapprove of, the opposite has become true. Those incapable of seeking truth on their own could become sheep easily led.