Reading as an Unnatural Behavior? Our Brains & the Technologies that Fry Them
Listening to NPR’s On Point on Tuesday morning, I heard something that gave me pause. The show, which was about new technologies and their effects on the brain, included the writer/journalist, Nick Bilton, who said that the brain isn’t programmed to read. He said that we’re programmed to communicate, but reading is actually quite unnatural. It’s something we teach ourselves to do despite our natures. I don’t know if I believe this, but it does kind of make sense. Most people, barring those with developmental disorders, who are exposed to other communicative people learn to speak, but reading is something that takes years of practice to get really good at, and even then, some people never get to the point where they can interact with texts in complex ways (locating implications and assumptions, arguing with the text, finding logical fallacies and holes in reasoning, making connections, etc.), so maybe, as Bilton later states, reading is much like other technologies that have an effect on the brain; it teaches our brains to behave in certain ways in order to collect information, just as using the Internet, iPhones/Pods/Pads, cell phones…do. The worry, though, and the difference for me, is that reading doesn’t seem to contribute to attention problems while these other communication technologies promote short attention spans, according to anecdotal evidence and other studies that were brought up on the show. The other guest, Nicholas Carr, who wrote the article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and the book The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, argues that these new technologies are changing the way we pay attention.
Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle. (from “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”)
I for one love technology. I text and surf and Google and Facebook (I don’t, however, Twitter just yet.) and I love the connectedness I feel that these technologies make possible. That may seem counterintuitive, but just think; now I can text my friend when she’s sick to let her know what she missed at the meeting, and she’ll get the information right away. I can share pictures and events via Facebook, and I can learn just about anything I want to know in a matter of seconds on the Internet. (My boyfriend and I are always looking up information on actors and directors on IMDB while we’re watching movies, which I’m sure has greatly altered our movie watching experience, made it more meta.)
But maybe the question is more one of quality over quantity. These technologies without a doubt give us quantity in every sense of the word, but what about quality of information and the time and attention to digest it? I am reluctant to allow my students to use the Internet, especially Wikipedia, for research because they are new at discerning between trustworthy sources of information and the stuff that is embarrassingly inaccurate. But this ability to tell the difference may be one of the most important skills they practice. On the other hand, the Internet promises and encourages fast answers to what are often complicated questions, leading students to believe that if they don’t find what they’re looking for (and they’re often completely clueless about the fact that they don’t really know what they’re looking for) in a few clicks of the mouse that they have failed and should look elsewhere.
Which leads me back to the question of attention and quality. If we are only willing to look for information in the shallowest of ways and if, once we find the information, we expect it to be easily digestible, then are we having a quality communicative experience? In other words, are our brains being trained to shut down or switch gears so quickly that we have a hard time thinking through higher level cognitive issues? I don’t know, but just the other day I was reading and commenting on a student’s essay while in front of my computer, and I found myself stopping every few minutes to click on something, check my email, look up a word, whatever it was I was distracted, and I remember making a conscious decision to turn my computer off. It was the only way I could force myself to pay attention.
Tags: "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", Facebook, IMBD, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bilton, NPR, On Point, research, teaching, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains, Wikipedia
I missed that On Point episode, and I haven’t read all Bilton’s stuff, but I just want to point out the logical extension of his argument as you described it. It would seem that his argument would be that our brains are wired for problem-solving, but not mathematics, and for visual tracking of objects (as hunters) but not for driving and watching traffic. That we are wired to eat but not to appreciate aromas and flavors. These things may all be true.
Could be that I’m off-base, and I probably am, basing these extensions of a summarized statement. But the point is of course our brains are changing. Of course we have different sensory inputs now than we did ten thousand years ago. And that’s the great thing about humanity, is that we are malleable to some extent. That’s about the only thing that gives me hope for our species.
Now maybe I’ll go actually read Bilton. Maybe he’s optimistic, too.
You’re right, Bilton is totally optimistic. It’s Carr who’s really worried about the changes. I’m a little bit in the middle because I love technology and the fact that we’re malleable enough to adapt to all these cool gadgets we keep making, but I also worry about the fact that nothing in our culture encourages us to pay attention, to think deeply, to meditate and question and make connections. Instead, it seems that most things encourage us to be in a state of confusion bouncing from one cool toy to another but never landing on anything.
Absolutely agreed with you on that. I see it in myself, too, the way I read things and end up distracted after only a couple of pages. But I’ve also noticed that it isn’t just that I want something else to do, but that I feel like there’s something more important to do. That’s what really scares me. Even though I know, sitting here, that checking my email every seven minutes isn’t as important as reading the rest of the short story I’m reading, somehow while I’m in the act of reading it seems so immediately important that I can’t help but check it. So maybe the problem is not just an attention issue, but also a value issue–if my values are misplaced (and things like email, IM, twitter, etc. all have inflated value over literature, family, etc.), then I’m much more apt to distract myself unnecessarily than if I just have a short attention span.
Well said, Marcus. I hadn’t thought of it as a value issue, but you’re absolutely right. No one’s really encouraging us to read, but everyone in the subtlest of ways is telling us to stay connected. We’re cyborgs! I just know it. :)
Hey Jaime,
I caught the end part of the NPR program and thought it super interesting. As I listened, I wondered if this was a generational thing. When I worked as a technical writer in Silicon Valley I did a lot of classes and work in information architecture and human interface factors, which looked at how people process information. A lot of researched talked about how the people that grew up with the internet as the main information base think of grouping of information differently than those of us who grew up mainly with books.
My brain is wired to think about information chunks as pages. I read page 5 before I read page 7 and to get from page 12 to page 20, I have to flip through 13-19. In my brain information is sorted in a linear order. For people who grew up with hyperlinks being as common as books, information is stored as one big chunk and you can get from one point to any other point by just clicking. In other words, their brains are wired to think of information chunks in 3D and one chunk is as close to all other chunks without any stuff in between.
Maybe Carr is experiencing his brain getting rewired from the book and pages model to the 3D chunk model?
Yeah, maybe you’re right about Carr. I think it’s fascinating to think that we’re moving from linear to 3D thinking. If you’re “wired” for linear thinking and then start to evolve toward 3D, it could be a little distracting and uncomfortable, as Carr noted about his own experience. It seems like the 3D way of processing the world would be more accurate and more complicated, meaning that it would encourage higher intelligence. But I still wonder if there’s any correlation between this 3D thinking and young people reading less. Maybe they’re not actually reading less; maybe they’re just reading different types of texts (Facebook, Twitter, text messages, Internet, etc.), which makes me wonder about quality vs. quantity again. Are these the kinds of texts people should be reading in order to be “literate” (whatever that means)? Are young people missing out when they move away from reading linear texts or are they finding new ways to challenge themselves?