We have to move into the 21st century, but we should do so with great care to build a 'bi-literate' brain that has the circuitry for 'deep reading' skills and, at the same time, is adept with technology.
Learning to read, for the brain, is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well.
The brain is constantly adapting.
What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think.
There are, no doubt, as many conceptualizations of the good life as there are lives that aspire to it, but surely one of the most important pathways to its achievement begins with the desire to seek what is good - for the self, for those we love, for 'our neighbor,' for our earth.
It's an individual waste and it's an economic waste for Australia not to recognise dyslexia.
Reading or written language is a cultural invention that necessitated totally new connections among structures in the human brain underlying language, perception, cognition, and, over time, our emotions.
The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.
Deep reading refers to a whole continuum of processes that include some of the most important things about thinking and how we connect thought to what we read - critical analysis, analogical reasoning, how we infer from the text, how do we take another's perspective.
I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive immersion, the joy and the effort of the third life, of thinking one's own thoughts and going beyond what is given.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.
The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text.
After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.
There's an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice.
I am an educator and neuroscientist who studies how the brain learns to read and what happens when a young brain can't learn to read easily, as in the childhood learning challenge, developmental dyslexia.
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. 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.
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. Further, it will adapt to that environment's requirements - from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used.
Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new 'reading circuit' afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity.
I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing.
