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Ann Patchett, Attention Span, barack obama, books, deep reading, digital age, empathy, empathy and reading, Harper Perennial, Mark Edmundson, Maryanne Wolf, multitasking, neuroscience, neuroscience of reading, Proust and The Squid, reading, Reading Comprehension, school, Tania Singer, teaching reading, Tufts University
How’s your attention span these days? How long can you read before you stop to Google something? Ann Patchett has some advice on the matter:
Maryanne Wolf has a few things to say too. Ten years ago she wrote the incredible book Proust and the Squid which covered the neuroscience behind the act of reading. However, just as it was published, things were changing. Yes, technology has been around for awhile, and it’s been quite some time that we’ve depended on computers, but avid readers are noticing changes in themselves. Our attention spans are shorter. Being a reader is work. If you’d like to continue being a reader, you must devote a conscious effort to fighting against the forces trying to shrink your attention span. Maryanne’s Wolf’s newest book reviews the neuroscience of reading and launches into a discussion on how things have changed and what that means for future generations. How can we prepare our children to be literate citizens and critical thinkers?
Reader, Come Home is told in a series of letters to readers and my favorite essay was on deep reading. All of us read a great deal on screens which encourage us to read quickly as we scan the page for information. Is that interfering with our ability to read deeply? What are the “cognitive threats” to so much screen time?
For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally.
The essay starts by reminding us of the emotions evoked by deep reading and, as Proust describes, the “fertile miracle of communication effected in solitude”. Reading, particularly reading literary fiction, increases empathy. We step into the lives of others and are forever changed. Fully engaging with the book you’re reading takes “cognitive patience”. In reading we dig deep to examine our prior judgements and how we view people. Neuroscientist Tania Singer’s work shows us that empathy activates areas all over the brain and ties together vision, language, theory of mind, touch, and cognition. Considering the 40% decline in empathy over the past twenty years, reading may be just the antidote we need.
It has to do with empathy. It has to do with being comfortable with the notion that the world is complicated and full of grays but there’s still truth there to be found, and that you have to strive for that and work for that. And the notion that it’s possible to connect with someone else even though they’re very different from you. -President Obama
Reading deeply also depends on, and improves, background knowledge. Everything we read, experience, and learn creates hooks in our brain to help us comprehend, predict, and read critically. Building background knowledge must be a focus. We must be lifelong learners. We must seek out diverse books, friendships, and experiences because, as Edward Tenner says, “It would be a shame if brilliant technology were to end up threatening the kind of intellect that produced it.”
We must be able to use our own knowledge base to grasp new information and interpret it with inference and critical analysis. The outline of the alternative is already clear: we will become increasingly susceptible human beings who are more and more easily led by sometimes dubious, sometimes even false information that we mistake for knowledge, or worse, do not care one way or another.
Later in the essay, Maryanne Wolf draws attention to Mark Edmundson’s book, Why Read? and details two additional threats to critical reading: 1) world views so impenetrable to change that divergent thought is not allowed and 2) the total absence of a personal belief system. Our young people need to know what they think and why they think it while being open to lifelong learning and growth. This will protect deep reading.
This book surpassed my wildest expectations for us and wraps up with her thoughts on how we should teach children to read in this digital age. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in the neuroscience of reading, teaching reading, or just wanting motivation to improve their own attention span.