The brain is plastic its whole life span.
As a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading, I am particularly concerned with the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society.
Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge.
I have always worried about who can read, who can't, who doesn't, and the great, life-altering consequences hidden within those distinctions.
I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
We would be the worst of fools if we would ever lose this extraordinary capacity to go beyond the limits of past thought and past prejudices.
My work on what is called 'deep reading' explores the range of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that underlie not only the emergence of creative thought when we read but also the development and strengthening of capacities like empathy and critical analysis that we can apply to the rest of our lives.
There's no question that our children's attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.
Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.
We are the worst of fools if we do not teach every child to become truly expert, deep readers.
I want children to learn to develop deep reading skills in the beginning in print. I believe the physicality of print is much better in the beginning for children, and then help them learn how to use their deep reading skills on digital medium.
I don't want technology to replace teachers, but where there are no teachers, or the teachers are overwhelmed, it can be helpful.
Skimming is fine for our emails, but it's not fine for some of the important forms of reading.
If you word-spot James Joyce, you'll miss the entire experience.
When we have any function, whether it's language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren't dealing with a straight line to the brain that says 'This is what I do.' The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function.
Focused reading is so important, and I'm just as guilty as everyone. I have to force myself to slow down, often printing things out or using print as a medium for things that are most important or for things whose beauty would be lost if I use other modes of reading.
Skimming has led, I believe, to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively challenging. I think that leads people to accept truly false news without examining it, without being analytical.
We need to discern what it is that requires reflection in our lives and in what we read and how we read it.
