Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. The negative effects of screen reading can appear as early as fourth and fifth grade 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 are indispensable to learning at any age. 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.
Further, it will adapt to that environment’s requirements – from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used. We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language it needs an environment to develop. 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. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written, we do not err as a society when we innovate, but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish while innovating.
This is not a simple, binary issue of print vs digital reading and technological innovation. There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it Photograph: Sjale/Getty Images/iStockphoto Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential “deep reading” processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading. 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. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. Unbeknownst to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing - a change with implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.Īs work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones older boys don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers.
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