(Over 60 diverse thinkers on how to get more from books)
Wolf is a scholar of reading, specialising in cognitive neuroscience and literacy.
In the seven years it took to write her book describing how the reading brain evolved, she noticed that our literacy-based culture was becoming very different and digitally-based (Wolf 2018, 6). Despite her significant research she did not realise how her own reading had been affected until the negative effects were clearly evident (p. 97). She had increasingly came to depend on online summaries for what she knew she should read in more detail in the future, became overwhelmed with deep and substantial newspapers and periodicals, and no longer read the books at her bedside which she’d previously looked forward to because she processed her email instead (pp. 97–98). When she did read books she tended to “read in them, rather than being whisked away by them” (ibid.). Without noticing it at the time, she had “begun to read more to be informed than to be immersed, much less to be transported” (p. 98).
Wolf, a prominent scholar and expert reader, was unaware of the gradual decline of her reflective faculties (p. 201). Because this process occurs slowly we may not notice “the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters” that can result (pp. 201–2). Her experience teaches us to reflect on how our own reading has changed over time (p. 202).
She analysed her situation by attempting to reread a childhood favourite which was both linguistically and conceptually challenging (pp. 98–9). She could not: the style seemed opaque and the pace impossibly slow (p. 99). She attempted to consciously read it slowly, but had became so accustomed to reading rapidly on the Internet that she was unable to slow down enough to comprehend the material (ibid.). So superficial and swift was her reading that she became frustrated at being unable to grasp deeper levels of meaning and complex language—deep-reading no longer felt possible (p. 100). She gave up. When she forced herself to return to this task she read in concentrated, twenty-minute sessions, and the book took her two weeks to finish (p. 101). Afterwards she felt, finally, “home again”, back to herself (ibid.). Now, her reading pace matched the book’s pace: she moderated her speed to match the action (ibid.).
Another potential difficulty modern readers face involves reading on digital devices. Wolf describes our understanding of the impact of screens, such as ebook readers, versus printed books, as incomplete. Screen reading appears to “encourage skimming, skipping, and browsing”, but also the screen’s lack of the concrete, spatial dimension of printed books may impair our ability to sequence information and remember detail (p. 78). Readers need awareness of their spatio-temporal location in the book such that they can return to challenging passages and learn from them, yet lack this on digital devices (ibid.). A specific concern is that our loss of tactile involvement in screen reading changes how we approach words and understand them in the text as a whole (p. 79) It’s been posited that the sensory aspect of reading in print adds a redundancy, a “geometry”, to words which aids our understanding (ibid.). Wolf, however, is not against reading digitally; she publicly advocates for digital tablets as a means for reducing non-literacy, for example (p. 12).
The rapid speed of information processing associated with screen reading unconsciously bleeds over to our other reading (p. 80). Especially when much of this time involves the distracting environment of the Internet, “where sequential thinking is less important and less used”, we begin to read that way even when we read printed material or want to read deeply (ibid.). This is presumably what Woolf experienced.
There is a “digital chain” linking the proliferation of information we now consume, the “gruel-thin, eye-byte servings consumed daily”, the quality, quantity, content, of what we read, and our motivation for reading, which imposes a tax on us which we’ve yet to fully tally (pp. 72, 85) When we create technologies to “gainsay our perceptual and intellectual limits” our capacities for attention and memory are altered (p. 204). Wolf worries that the “very plasticity of a reading brain that reflects the characteristics of digital media” could “precipitate the atrophy of our most essential thought processes—critical analysis, empathy, and reflection—to the detriment of our democratic society” (pp. 203–4). Reading is a political act because as we became less able to fully employ these faculties, we become less able to dispassionately evaluate how those who would govern us think (p. 199).
Wolf sees no quick fixes for breaking this chain, but identifies “lives that propel and sustain” good readers (p. 13). The good reader embodies the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and leisure; and the life of contemplation (ibid.). We are awash in the first life, the acquisition of information and knowledge (p. 189). Likewise, the second life that transports us out of our everyday life contains an abundance of “reading’s varied forms of entertainment” (p. 190).
It is the third life that is under threat (p. 13). This reflective domain is where reading enables critical thinking and responsible decision making (pp. 197–198). It is the habitat of our inner selves, a “suspended joy” we enter when we leave our surface self behind and temporarily transcend time (p. 194). But this does not happen at random, and is not reached by a happy-go-lucky temperament; it is achieved by the reader who makes the time and effortful intention (ibid.). Sustaining this faculty is not a given: we must protect and nurture our third life in order to retain our collective intelligence, compassion, and wisdom, and pass this on to future generations (pp. 191, 13).
This requires that we learn a stronger capacity for “cognitive patience” (p. 46). Wolf uses the phrase festina lente (“hurry slowly”) to suggest how we may experience this meditative dimension more consciously by “knowing how to quiet the eye and allow your thoughts to settle and be still, poised for what will follow” (p. 193). Festina lente releases us from the now common, stunted way of reading: “fast if you can, slowly if you must” (ibid.). To hurry slowly is “to recover a rhythm of time that allows you to attend with consciousness and intention. You read quickly (festina), till you are conscious (lente) of the thoughts to comprehend, the beauty to appreciate, the questions to remember, and, when fortunate, the insights to unfold” (ibid.). This functions as a metaphor for how our reading brain should work: “we decode automatically until perception becomes transformed into concepts, when time becomes consciously slowed, and our whole self becomes suffused by the mental cascade where thought and feeling converge” (p. 194).
Our goal in deep reading is “to be continuously engaged in trying to reach and express our best thoughts so as to expand an ever truer, more beautiful understanding of the universe and to lead lives based on this vision” (p. 203). Hurrying slowly we may learn to extract knowledge from information, and transform knowledge into wisdom (p. 202). In this way a society’s good readers “are both its canaries—which detect the presence of danger to its members—and its guardians of our common humanity” (ibid.).