Stop What You’re Doing and Read This! (10 page)

One thing I’ve noticed about myself and other devoted readers – and I think it’s revealing – is that we often have a hard time separating a book’s words from the paper the words are printed on. Our love of reading manifests itself in a romantic attachment to the physical book. A volume on a shelf becomes a kind of sacred relic. Glancing at its spine spurs memories of the time in which it was read or of the emotions it aroused. Some readers even rhapsodise, Proust-like, about the way books smell. They relish the ink-and-adhesives scent of a freshly printed book and the musty aroma of an old one. I confess that I’ve never shared that particular passion. A
fragrant
book simply makes me sneeze. My own attachment is more to the heft of a printed volume. When I hold a book in my hands, I feel as though I’m holding a metaphor for its contents. One journeys through a book, going deeper with each turn of a page, as one journeys through a story. My copy of
Moby-Dick
, that most spermatic of novels, is a pliable brick: 800 pages of small, tightly spaced type. It tells me to pack a trunk, to steel myself for a long and hazardous journey.

There are those who dismiss the reverence readers feel for physical books as mere sentimentality. Words are words, they say, however they’re presented. I’m not so sure. Back in the seventh century, when books were still handwritten by scribes, the theologian Isaac of Nineveh wrote of how it felt to make his way through a long series of pages: ‘as in a dream, I enter a state when my sense and thoughts are concentrated. Then, with the prolonging of this silence the turmoil of memories is stilled in my heart, ceaseless waves of joy are sent me by inner thoughts, beyond expectation suddenly arising to delight my heart.’ Reading is more than the visual decoding of alphabetic symbols. It is a state of mind, a dream of life, and a book, if it is going to be a true book,
needs
to be more than a container of words; it needs to be a shield against busyness, a transport to elsewhere. Stevens put it simply: ‘The house was quiet because it had to be.’

READING TRANSFORMS THE
human brain, which transforms the mind, which transforms the life of every reader.

Few of us ever stop to realise how momentous and semi-miraculous the achievement of reading is for our species. We were never born to read or write anything. Unlike vision or language, reading has no genetic programme that unfolds to create an ideal form of itself. Rather, learning to read lies outside the original repertoire of the human brain’s functions and requires a whole new circuit to be built afresh with each new reader.

Literally and physiologically, the brain changes itself by building a versatile ‘reading circuit’ out of a rearrangement of its original structures, such as visual, conceptual and language areas. Which structures are recruited, and how extensively and
deeply
they are used, depends on many factors. More specifically, because there is no genetic blueprint for reading, the brain’s reading circuit will adapt itself to what is being asked – by the characteristics of the writing system (e.g. English alphabet vs Hebrew alphabet vs Chinese logo-syllabary); by the formation process (how much, how well the child is taught to use all the many cognitive resources available to each part of the process); by the content of what is read; and finally by the medium (e.g. sign, book, Internet, e-book). This means that the very plasticity that allows every novice reader to build a fresh new circuit to read could prove to be not only a gift, but also an Achilles heel.

The specific factors that affect the formation of the reading circuits take on special significance in the present moment, as we move from a literacy-based culture to one dominated by digital tools and a digital sense of time. Immersed and shaped anew by varied technological mediums, the reading brain as we know it will be changed and to some degree supplanted by a different reading circuit. No one fully knows what form this new circuit will take or what this will ultimately mean for all of us.

What we do know is that for centuries our
species
has honed the present ‘expert’ reading brain. We have done so by learning over time to integrate decoding skills with what we refer to as the ‘deep-reading’ processes: e.g. analogical thought, inferential reasoning, perspective-taking, critical analysis, imagination, insight, novel thought, etc. The integration of these processes during reading is automatic for expert readers, but it can never be taken for granted. Rather, how well deep-reading processes are incorporated in the reading act depends significantly on how that circuit was formed over years of learning. The expert reader must expend considerable cognitive effort and time (in milliseconds and in years) to reach the point where the reading act leads automatically to the expansion of personal thought.

A pivotal question in today’s historical transition is whether the more time-consuming demands of these deep-reading processes will atrophy or, in fact, never be fully formed in children raised within a culture whose principal mediums for reading increasingly advantage speed, multitasking and the processing of the next ‘new’ piece of information. Will an immersion in digitally dominated forms of reading change the capacity and the motivation of the reader (expert and novice) to utilise their more sophisticated reading
capacities
, encouraging them to think deeply, reflectively and in an intellectually autonomous manner? Will new readers feel such efforts warrant no justification, since the analyses of many others are simply a click away? Or will easy access to sophisticated analyses and potential collaborators serve to enrich and motivate further thought and discussion, bringing students to new levels of discovery? Will the presence of digital tools such as translations and definitions serve to enhance the reading experience, by acting as bootstraps when difficulties are encountered, or will they disrupt it? What will such directions mean to the intellectual autonomy of individuals?

These questions cannot be answered yet by existing evidence, but there are important insights from the history of literacy, neuroscience and literature that can help better prepare us to ask critical questions now – that is, before the reading brains of the next generation are fully altered. The Greek transition from an oral culture to a literacy-based culture provides a valuable analogue to our present transition. Perhaps somewhat ironically, Socrates, Greece’s most eloquent apologist for an oral culture, protested at the acquisition of literacy on the basis of concerns that are as
prescient
today as they remain surprising. Socrates argued that the seeming permanence of the printed word would delude the young into thinking they had accessed the essence of some aspect of knowledge, rather than simply decoded it. For him only the intellectually effortful process of probing, analysing and internalising knowledge would enable the young to develop a lifelong, personal approach to knowing and thinking, which could lead them to their ultimate goals – wisdom and virtue. Only the examined word and the ‘examined life’ were worth pursuing, with all the intellectual discipline and exertion they required. Literacy, Socrates believed, would short-circuit both.

Steeped in oral culture, it was difficult for Socrates to imagine that the printed word would give rise to a complex reading brain that would foster the development of an internalised platform for probing, analysing and reflecting on what is read. That said, there was a trade-off made then, with aspects of oral culture and memory lost for ever – just as there will be a trade-off in our present transition. Unlike then, we can examine with far more knowledge both what we have in the present reading brain and what we hope to preserve. A brief summary of the first 500 milliseconds of the
reading
act illumines the existing panoply of components that come together when we read. As we read even a single word, the first milliseconds of reading are devoted to the activation of extensive areas of the cortex and subcortical regions that are necessary for ‘decoding’ the word’s visual information and connecting it to all that we know about the word. This latter knowledge requires input from regions responsible for everything from the word’s sounds to its many possible meanings and associations, to its varied grammatical and pragmatic functions. Over time, this first, large set of operations becomes virtually automatic, thereby allowing us in the next milliseconds to go beyond the decoded text. Within the next pivotal milliseconds we enter a cognitive space where we can connect the decoded information to all that we know and feel. It is within the latter phase of the expert reading circuit that we learn to connect the decoded information to the ‘deep-reading’ processes, and ultimately to our capacity to think new thoughts. This is the generative, cognitively transformative platform at the heart of the reading process. It is unique in the intellectual history of the species.

Perhaps no one better captured what and how the reader begins to think in those last
milliseconds
of the reading circuit than the French novelist Marcel Proust. He characterised this ‘heart of reading’ as that moment when ‘that which is the end of their [the author’s] wisdom is but the beginning of ours’ (Proust, 1906). Insights from Proust, Socrates and cognitive neuroscience research converge here. However we define it, Proust’s ‘wisdom’ represents the acme within the expert reading brain’s circuit that is, itself, the sum of multiple, personal, deep-reading capacities. Proust’s wisdom and the reading brain’s internal platform for thought are the basis for Socrates’ wisdom, which is the basis for the ‘examined’ life. Through the internalised development of all these capacities, human beings learn to think in new ways. As former editor Peter Dimock writes (2010), ‘this kind of reading, then, is a time of internal solitary consciousness in which the reading consciousness is brought up to the level of the knowledge of the author –
the farthest point another mind has reached
, as it were’ (our italics).

The problem is that there is neither genetic guarantee nor cultural pressure to ensure that the individual novice reader will ever reach such an intellectual ‘farthest point’ as described by Dimock, or form the expert reading-brain circuitry
necessary
to attain it. As demonstrated in existing research, the reading circuit in its current iteration can be fully fashioned and fully implemented over time, or it can be ‘short-circuited’ at any juncture in its development: e.g. early on in its formation period – through poor instruction, impoverished environments or inadequate motivation and opportunity; or after its formation, in the diminished execution of all its available cognitive resources under certain conditions. Several key questions emerge at the present moment: will short-circuiting occur based on the medium used for most reading before the reading circuit is fully formed? Will the short-circuiting of some processes be replaced by the addition of a whole new repertoire of cognitive skills better suited to the pace and glut of information available today? What are the intellectual advantages and costs involved in the different possible scenarios?

For example, will the omnipresence of innumerable distractions for attention, coupled with the sheer volume of information available, contribute in our young to a mindset
towards
reading that seeks to reduce the massive information to its lowest conceptual denominator as quickly as possible? With too much before them to grasp, and a set towards immediate feedback, will today’s
novice
reader learn to want things simple, quick and explained by others? Alternatively, will young people immersed in technological innovation become adept at prioritising, sorting and critically evaluating information, adapting different types of reading styles based upon their purpose (finding info, understanding it)? The opportunities to engage with all manner of subjects and audiences might fuel their motivation to read and communicate, sparking new thoughts and ideas. Will the flexibility of digital text (alterations in size, access to definitions, etc.) actually enhance the reading experience for many readers, propelling them into a deeper engagement with text, or will such enhancements serve as further distractions?

There are no pat answers and no binary solutions for any of these questions. Technological innovation is critical to all of us if we are to advance. Few need to be reminded of the life-changing advantages of the digital culture’s technological advances. It is clear that today’s children, not tomorrow’s, require a new set of intellectual tools and capacities if they are to become productive members of their culture. But as a society, we need to understand how our collective immersion in daunting amounts of digital information has the potential to either encourage
intellectual
exploration and creation or to ‘damp down’ readers’ use of their most cognitively demanding resources by encouraging speed and sound-bites. We need to know the implications of a dependency on external platforms of knowledge for the depth and autonomy of our thought.

Ultimately, we may already have within our grasp the tools to conceptualise what the ‘new readers’ of the twenty-first century need: a differently evolving reading circuit, one that connects the existing expert deep-reading skills to the evolving information-processing skills in order to be able to use the resources of the twenty-first-century external platforms of knowledge wisely and well. The task is to figure out how to get there. We will need many minds to plot this progression.

Just as in the Greeks’ transition from oral to literacy-based cultures, our issues today are not about whether we are to become a digital culture or not. Socrates’ concerns were never really about whether the Greek youth should read or not. Socrates worried that a lack of internalised knowledge would lead to a lack of reflection about one’s personal relationship to the acme of knowledge, wisdom and virtue. So too now. In this historical transition we must focus on the essential
questions
about the reciprocal relation between the quality of reading – at every stage of its development – and the quality of thought and virtue in individuals and in society. Will alterations in how we read over time change how we think? And, finally, will changes in how we think alter the quality of how we live out our lives? No one has the answers to these questions, but in asking we begin their investigation and recognise their importance for the intellectual, social and ethical development of our species.