Are you reading this? Your brain thanks you
For many, reading and thinking deeply can seem a lost pursuit in this ever-changing digital world. But this does not have to be the case, according to cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf, PhD, incoming director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at University of Southern California, Los Angeles.
In her book “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World,” (Harper, 2018) and in an interview with WBUR’s “On Point,” Dr. Wolf describes her unease over her seeming inability to focus on the printed page other than the tendency to grab snippets of detail.
“At some time impossible to pinpoint, I had begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported,” she says.
Pondering this led her to realize that she was still up to the mental task of reading but was not devoting as much time to it. She set aside time each day to revisit a novel that she had found daunting reading in her youth, “Magister Ludi” by Hermann Hesse. The novel still proved to be slow going. But optimistically, the experiment made clear to Dr. Wolf that she had “changed in ways I would never have predicted. I now read on the surface and very quickly; in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels, which forced me constantly to go back and reread the same sentence over and over with increasing frustration.”
The culprit, she concludes, was the instant world of the Internet. Her brain had become used to dabbling in information. In the absence of cognitive impediments, she says, what was lacking in brainpower could be restored. To Dr. Wolf and others who fret over the difficulty in the pleasure of relaxing with a book, there is comfort in knowing that, with some literary exercise, the brain can shift from the digital world to the less frenetic world of the printed page.