Tuesday, April 08, 2014

Skim this article! How the Internet has ruined your brain for serious reading...

According to Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts University and one of the world’s foremost authorities on the study of reading, the superficial manner in which we read material online is making it difficult for us understand works that require more than a momentary commitment to comprehend them.

The author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain told the Washington Post that she worries “that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing.”

“The brain is plastic its whole life span,” Wolf said, “the brain is constantly adapting.” And it is currently “adapting” to an online environment that favors the acquisition of information at the quickest possible speed.


She even claimed to be a victim of this new mode of “reading” herself, telling the Post about a recent evening in which she attempted to read Hermann Hesse’s long, modernist novel The Glass Bead Game.

“I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.” Full story...

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