Dear Reader

Our brain development is being put at risk by the sheer volume of reading we are doing online and on digital devices.

- Sally Blundell

Your brain has been in training for 6000 years to read this article. It was then, about six millennia ago, reports neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, that the acquisition of literacy demanded the development of new brain circuitry. Since then, that new wiring has evolved from being able to perform simple decoding steps, such as being able to count goats in a herd, into the present sophisticated reading brain.

As a species, we are not natural-born readers. As Wolf noted in her 2007 book Proust and the Squid, 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, and well, changed the very structure of that circuit’s connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.”

Now these “deep-reading” processes – the ability to apply critical analysis, empathy and imagination, to discern truth, gauge inference and appreciate beauty – are under threat. As Wolf writes in her evocatively titled new book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, the greatest explosion of creativity, invention and discovery in our history, our almost complete transition to a digital culture, is changing the way we absorb and retain information in ways we never imagined.

“When we are reading in print, we have time to allocate to those kinds of cognitive processes,” she tells the Listener from her office at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she is a visiting professor. “By and large, reading on a screen encourages multitasking, a different form of attention, a different speed of processing.”