Article is from WeChat public account: Neural Reality (ID: neurality) , author: WOLF, title figure from: Mark Smith
We need to cultivate a new type of brain: it has the “dual reading” ability, and it can understand the deepest thoughts through electronic media or traditional media.
When the brain skims text, we don’t have time to understand the complexity, nor can we understand the feelings of others and the beauty of words. The digital age calls for a new kind of reading.
The next time you take a flight, look around and you will find that the iPad has become a new pacifier for babies; children who just go to school read stories on their smartphones, and senior students simply do n’t read and bend down Music Back is immersed in the game world; parents and some other passengers read on the Kindle, or quickly “brush” a long list of emails and news feeds. What most people don’t realize is that people in this scene are exposed to an invisible revolution: The neuron circuits that enable the brain to read are changing rapidly in an imperceptible way; never Academic experts ranging from toddlers to adults are involved.
Neuroscience research shows that humans gained literacy more than 6000 years ago, and the brain has formed a new circuit accordingly. This circuit evolved from a simple mechanism for decoding basic information; starting from counting sheep in the flock, we gradually developed extremely complex reading skills.
My research is dedicated to deciphering the current reading brain, trying to describe how it has contributed to the development of some of our most important intellectual and emotional processes: knowledge internalization, analogical reasoning, and logical reasoning; empathy and empathy; critical Analysis and generation of insights. Today, many cutting-edge studies around the world warn us: As we move to digital product-based reading models, these important “deep reading” capabilities are at stake.
Davide Bonazzi
This is not a simple problem between paper books and e-books, nor is it a cliché that “technology is a double-edged sword”. As the MIT scholar Shirley Turck (Sherry Turkle) puts it, it is not innovation itself that makes our society collectively err, It is the things that are ignored and weakened when we ignore the innovation.
At this critical juncture of print and digital culture, society must face up to these issues–the brain circuits dedicated to reading are gradually shrinking, what abilities our children and seniors have failed to develop, and How can we respond.
Scientific research tells us that reading is different from vision or language. Reading circuits are not given to humans by innate genetic blueprints. They need to develop in the environment. Not only that, it will adapt to the requirements of the environment, and different writing systems or media characteristics will shape different reading circuits. If mainstream media (like today’s electronic media) encourage fast, multi-tasking-oriented and adaptable reading process for large amounts of information, we The reading circuit will also move closer in this direction.
Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (Patricia Greenfield) wrote that Less time and attention are allocated to the relatively slow and time-consuming deep reading processes; these processes include logical inference, critical analysis, and empathy. And all these skills are essential for learning at any age.
More and more education surveys and psychological and anthropological studies confirm this. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmunds (Mark Edmundson) said that many college students try to avoid reading classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries Because they do n’t have the patience to deal with long, dense, and difficult texts.
However, compared with the “cognitive irritability” of these students, the deeper issues under this phenomenon are more worrying: the level of critical analysis of many students seems to be unable to deal with the ideas and arguments contained in difficult text Complexity. Whether it’s school literary or scientific readings, or wills, contracts, and questionnaires that were deliberately obscure during the referendum, they may be difficult to understand.
Many studies have shown that the use of electronic screens may have a series of negative downstream effects on the reading comprehension of senior high school and college students. A psychologist Anne Mangen of Stavanger, Norway (Anne Mangen) and colleagues conducted a study to examine different media for high school students Understand the impact of the same material.
Mangan’s team asked the subjects to read the short story “Jenny, My Love” (Jenny, Mon Amour) -this is sexy Stupid love stories, students generally like this plot-and then asked them to answer some related questions; half of the students read on the Kindle, while the other half read paperback books. As a result, students who read printed matter understand better than those who read on screen, and they perform particularly well on the task of listing details and recounting the plot in chronological order.
Amy Liu of San Jose State University (Transliteration) The “new normal” of reading is skimming, which is characterized by word positioning and quick glance at text. Many people today follow the trajectory of “F” or “Z”, they first extract the first sentence of each paragraph, and then find the keywords in the remaining text accordingly. When the brain skims like this, it cuts down on the time allotted to the deep reading process. In other words, we have no time to comprehend complex meanings, no time to understand the feelings of others, no time to feel beauty, and no time to create our own new ideas in reading.
Davide Bonazzi
Karin Litao (Karin Littau) and Andrew Pepper (Andrew Piper) notices another dimension of reading: materiality. Li Tao, Pepper and Mangen emphasized that the touch of printed matter adds important redundancy to the information-such redundancy gives the word “geometric structure” and also gives a spatial “existence” in the text < span class = "text-remarks" label = "Remarks"> (thereness) .
Pepper pointed out that Humans need a knowledge of their time and space in order to be able to return to certain things and gain something by re-examining them-what he calls “recurring technology” . Recurrence is important for young or older readers because it involves the ability to go back somewhere in the text to check and self-assess understanding. The next question is, what about young people’s understanding of words when skimming reading due to lack of space and sexuality?
American media researcher Lisa Ghossi (Lisa Guernsey) , American university linguist NaOmi Barron (Naomi Baron) and Tami Katz, a cognitive scientist at the University of Haifa (Tami Katzir) examines the impact of different information media on people (especially young people) . Katz research found that the negative effects of screen reading are already reflected in the students in the fourth and fifth grades of elementary school, and it is not limited to the ability to understand, and the formation of their common emotions is also affected.
Our electronic culture may inadvertently cause “collateral damage” to critical analysis, empathy, and other in-depth reading processes-but the problem is far more than choosing print or electronic screens. The key is how we have changed reading as a whole through any medium, and how these changes have affected the way we read, and even how we have reshaped the purpose of our reading. This is not just a question concerning young people.
The gradual shrinking of critical analysis and empathy affects everyone. Our ability to navigate for a long time in the ocean of information is not as good as before. This also forced us to fall back to a familiar, unreviewed information warehouse, to a zone where no analysis was needed and has not been analyzed, with the result that- We have no defense against false information and inflammatory statements.
There is a golden rule in neuroscience that does not change with time, which is “either use it or lose it.” This guideline offers hope for critical thinking in the reading brain, as it implies that choice remains. The story of reading the evolution of the brain is far from over. Before these changes in reading methods were ingrained, we already had the scientific and technological means to identify and correct them.
As long as we work hard to find out what humans will lose, we also value the new capabilities that the electronic age has given us.Force, you will find that vision and caution are actually two sides of a coin. We need to cultivate a new type of brain: it has the ability to “double read”, and it can understand the deepest thoughts, whether through electronic or traditional media. Such a brain can bear many heavy responsibilities: can citizens in a vibrant democratic society think in other places, remove falsehoods, and save truth; will our children and grandchildren have the ability to appreciate and create beauty; Get rid of the current frenzy of information and find the knowledge and wisdom necessary to maintain the good functioning of society.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/aug/25/skim-reading-new-normal-maryanne-wolf
Maryanne Wolf
Visiting professor at UCLA; director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice. Popular science writer.
Article from WeChat public account: Neurality (ID: neureality) author: WOLF