Thursday Trends: How the internet is changing our brains

And how reading is key to developing cognitive resilience

I have thought often about the piece I’m posting here, which I originally wrote for government clients in March 2023. Hopefully, it comes as no surprise that the Intelligence Community (IC) is concerned with peoples’ ability to think, whether it’s one’s own employees or the people living in a country of interest. If you’re a parent, I suspect the following will resonate with you, too (I think a good deal of the comments we got on the piece were from that perspective).

What follows is basically a review of Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Maryanne Wolf. Wolf is the author of Proust and the Squid which, when it came out in 2007, was acclaimed as the first look at what happens in the brain when we read. Wolf is a professor at Tufts and neuroscientist but started out as a literature major and turned her attention to science when she wanted to become a better teacher.

She wrote Reader, Come Home in 2018[1] and it addresses a question that concerns many of us now: has digitalization of our reading media affected our ability to read and understand? This may seem like a no-brainer and—spoiler alert—she believes it has, but it’s worth reading on to understand exactly why our brains are changing, and so quickly.

Let’s start with the key points of Proust and the Squid: humans weren’t born to read and our brains had to change in order to do it. Thanks to neuroplasticity, this was possible. “The long developmental process of learning to read deeply and well changed the very structure of [the brain’s synapses, connections within the brain], which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought”, writes Wolf. What’s more, “the quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.” In other words, the more you read, the better you think because you’re pushing your brain to develop more and more connections, to build what you could call knowledge.

The traditionally printed word is the gateway to learning new things but also, Wolf says, trains us to think critically as well as develop empathy for those unlike ourselves. It’s the incredibly immersive quality of books that makes this possible.

Wolf believes that digital media is short-circuiting our ability to read deeply. It affects people who have been deep readers their entire lives but it’s particularly difficult for young readers who, unless this trend changes, will not develop the deep-reading processes, the multitude of connections in the brain, or the accumulation of information that represents knowledge.

Oral language, Wolf says, is a basic human function. Reading is not. What’s more, there is not only one way to construct what she calls a “reading brain”. Different languages and environments place difference requirements on the brain. Cells form working groups that become specialists to carry out specific functions. To read with any kind of speed, your brain needs to recognize letter shapes, words, meanings and often make predictions about what will come next (like autocorrect) in a nanosecond.

The digital medium is completely different from a physical book. Digital mediums favor immediacy, switching between devices, monitoring our distractions, and slicing our attention in ever thinner slices. You might argue that the ability to glean as much information as possible from multiple information sources is the kind of reading that’s needed in the 21^st century. That we’re merely experiencing another shift in the nature of human communication, the way our ancestors bitched when we stopped memorizing epic poems once writing was invented.

But not really, Wolf argues. For one thing, we read differently for entertainment than when we read closely, deeply. Different regions of the brain are activated for deep reading, including those responsible for touch and movement. We’re imprinting the information more deeply inside us. Also, reading is cumulative. We need to read to broaden our horizons, build context, and to comprehend an unfamiliar concept. And build more of those all-important reading synapses.

The young, who are not reading deeply, will not know what they do not know, Wolf points out.

With digital media, we skim. We often read the beginning, dip into the middle (maybe), flip to the end. The quality of our attention is poor. A study by Time of the media habits of people in their twenties found they switched media sources 27 times an hour and checked their cell phones nearly 200 times a day.

We are being presented with too much information, Wolf writes, and we are hardwired to be aware of new stimulus (novelty bias). It’s what kept our ancestors alive. But now we don’t see or hear with the same quality of attention that we had in the deep reading times, and we’re so habituated to jumping between stories we can’t stop.

· Hyperattention is a phenomena caused by rapid task switching, high levels of stimulation, and a low threshold for boredom.

· Is the quality of reading different between an ebook and a paper book? The jury is still out, Wolf says, but studies have shown that students who read paper books are better at reconstructing plots in chronological order and retaining details.

It’s not that we’re not reading. We consume between 50,000 and 100,000 words a day, according to studies, the equivalent of a novel, but consume in “spasmodic bursts”. More worrying is that information has gone from being knowledge to entertainment. If information is perceived as entertainment at the surface level, it tends to remain on the surface.

Wolf says professors worry that young people don’t want to expend the effort to think. Students don’t have the patience to read books from the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The language is too dense, the books too long. Students lack the cognitive patience needed to wade through such works. In turn, their writing is suffering. “The central issue is not their intelligence, nor, more than likely, even their lack of familiarity with different styles of writing. Rather, it may come back to a lack of cognitive patience with demanding critical analytic thinking and a concomitant failure to acquire cognitive persistence”, Wolf writes. Mental grit, in other words.

Wolf tested herself with a dense, complex early 20^th century novel that she had read and enjoyed before. I think we’ll all recognize what she experienced: she couldn’t do it. Her reading habits had been changed. She got impatient with the long sentences and doughy thoughts. Her eyes wanted to read quickly but then comprehension was lost.

As a novelist, I hear this all the time from readers. They no longer have the patience for books, even relatively unchallenging ones. They get impatient with the story--“too slow”—or they can’t follow even a simple plot. Wolf managed to find her novel-reading groove by attacking the book in concentrated 20-minute intervals. Eventually, she began to enjoy the book.

The author devotes several chapters to the implications for children, which I won’t review here but I suspect will be of interest to parents. Basically, she calls for teaching children to read both ways: to read deeply and to skim.

There’s one last important point: we lose our capacity for empathy¹ if we stop reading novels. Movies and TV give you some perspective, but it’s in the pages of a good novel that we come to understand lives dissimilar to our own. Books free us from ourselves, let us experience what it’s like to be another person, and then to come back into ourselves, changed. “What will happen to young readers who never meet and begin to understand the thoughts and feelings of someone totally different… It is a formula for unwitting ignorance, fear and misunderstanding that can lead to the belligerent forms of intolerance that are the opposite of America’s original goals for its citizens of many cultures”, Wolf observes.

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[1] Maryanne Wolf, Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, 2018, HarperCollins Publishers

1. This was written in 2018, well before the current wave of book banning currently challenging our libraries and schools.