Considering the brain from an elevated balcony at Publik Coffee Roasters in Salt Lake City, UT.
My brain is my most precious organ. Whenever I bike to work during my daily commute at home, I affix my helmet tightly around my head (my coworkers often make fun of me for the bike helmet lines that remain on my forehead for at least a half hour after I’ve removed my helmet; I wear my helmet that tightly) because I know that if my brain gets scrambled, so do I. I’ve invested a lot in this brain of mine, and yet there’s still so much that I don’t know about it. The inner-workings of my brain are, in fact, a rather large mystery to me, but I think it’s important to understand why my brain processes information the way it does to understand how much of what I experience as a reader is a learned, social behavior and how much is driven by a biological process.
I spent a good chunk of my afternoon thinking about the neuroscience of reading because neuroscientific studies are often what get cited in popular news articles about reading in the digital age. Indeed, one major argument against reading in a digital age emerges out of citations from studies that demonstrate how much materiality affects retention and cognition. I’ve long wondered about the details of those studies and how they might impact the work I do as a writing instructor and educator. I do not want to dismiss scientific studies, and I simultaneously wonder how those studies were conducted, how the fMRI scans from those studies were interpreted, and under what conditions those studies were executed. I’m no scientist, and I wholeheartedly trust the scientific method, and I also know that scientific studies are also often conducted under limited conditions, and they need a lot of reproduction among different populations to be truly verifiable.
I read Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf in graduate school, so I was eager to work through her new(er) (but not newest) book, Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century. For the unfamiliar, Proust and the Squid is an excellent introduction to the concept of the “neuroscience of the reading brain,” and it helped me understand how the mechanisms of the brain support reading. It also helped me understand that the “reading brain” is complicated, and that the parts of our brain that support reading actually involve and change. Indeed, our brains have something called neuroplasticity that allow the connections in our brain to make new connections over time. Our brains, in other words, can change based on our circumstances. Isn’t that wild??
I had intended to work through some active note-taking on only a few chapters of Wolf’s Tales, but I wound up reading the whole book in one sitting, all 70,000+ words, which might be a new record for me. It’s been a long time since I’ve been unable to tear myself away from an academic text, but there was so much that Wolf, an interdisciplinary scholar who works at the intersection of psychology, child development, neuroscience, and literature, managed to accomplish. She reinvigorated my investment in considering the importance of what I want to explore: how can we make room for reading in a digital age in a way that responsibly acknowledges the history of reading without rattling the harbingers of doom around the never-ending wails that print is “dying?” How do we integrate scientific perspectives into humanistic ones?
There were so many moments in this book where I felt struck by the clarity of the insight, but I found the articulation of why the stakes of understanding literacy in the 21st century literacy is so high to be one of the most striking moments:
“The real equation is that the more we know, the more we can go beyond our own limits. More specifically, the more we read, the more we bring to whatever we read now and next” (p. 121).
This insight, while simple, struck me so greatly because it brought home the importance of puzzling out what we do with moving into a digitally literate citizenry. That is, acquiring digital literacy is not just about helping people develop particular sets of skills or adapt to a new age. Rather, it’s about expanding people’s prior knowledge so that they can go beyond those expectations to start creating and bringing together lots of pieces of information. There is neuroscientific evidence that shows that our brains make more connections when we’re able to build on prior connections.
So, we’re in an extremely exciting moment in our history as communicative beings because the most privileged among us have a variety of choices we can make about how we choose to read and when. Should we acquire digital literacies, we bring “more” to our future endeavors. And even for those who do not have the privilege of choosing between different materials from which to consume text (most youth today will mostly have exposure to digital rather than print texts), building an educational culture that understands the value of unpacking the needs to be literate in the twenty-first century will only allow each of us to contribute more to our communities.
My responses to Wolf here are optimistic, of course, but I don’t think they’re unreasonable. I think I’ve felt so bothered by the lamentations of “lost attention,” “divided cognition,” and “disconnectedness” in the digital age because all of these arguments are grounded fundamentally in an argument driven by anxiety and loss. These kinds of emotions don’t do anything for us. We can’t return to a time when digital reading is no longer a part of our lives. We read thousands upon thousands of words each day digitally, so we need to understand how to be better at reading those words so that we don’t feel like we’re “scattered” or “absent” or “disconnected” or “shallow.” These are, after all, feelings, and as Wolf describes in her book, there is no one way of reading that humanity has engaged in for all time.
Literacy is, at its core, a social construction, so the ways in which we’ve used materiality to learn how to read are byproducts of that social constructedness (as opposed to a behavior that’s biological or innate; humans are not born with the ability to be literate, of course). Given that, why can’t we shape our own social customs around reading to be attuned to the range of ways that we can understand and engage deeply with a text?
There’s so much more I could say about this book, but I’ll leave it here for now. I’m still making some connections from this book to other readings I’ve done for this institute – as well as the research I’ve done prior to that institute – but these are the insights that really resonated with me today.