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. Read more »

Find exemplars wherever you can.

Last week while talking to my creative writing class about various structures they might try fitting their fiction into I found myself suddenly using the movie The Hangover as an example of a classic story form. My students, all of whom save two had seen the movie, were excited to talk about something they actually liked and engaged in willingly outside of class. “Oh yeah, that movie was so funny!” they exclaimed while I tried to backtrack a little in order to make sure they understood that we were still having a constructive, academic conversation. We’d talked a bit about journey stories already, and several students had attempted writing road trip stories, knowing from reading our textbook that it’s usually a bad idea to write a scene that places one character alone in a car unless they are thinking about something active outside of the car, a flashback maybe, since a one-person scene tends to lack energy or conflict, two things that stories thrive on. So I ask them, “Why do you think the writers chose to place four men together in this car? Why not two?” One student said that if there were only two guys the story couldn’t have existed because one of the guys has to go missing for the plot to go on. “Okay, good point, but why four? What is each character doing in this movie? How does each one play an important role in propelling the plot?” That’s when the conversation improved. Read more »