Our brain no longer tries to understand complex text, author’s emotions, and different perspectives. Scanning has become the new normal in the digital age.
Shenzhen Translation Bureau is its compilation team, focusing on the fields of technology, business, workplace, life, etc., focusing on introducing new technologies, new ideas, and new trends abroad.
Editor’s note: In the digital age, more and more people are beginning to read books on the screen instead of reading paper-based books, and their habit has become scanning instead of reading in depth. The author conducts a comparative study of human nerves and finds that this change in reading habits will profoundly affect our brain. This article comes from Medium, author Maryanne Wolf, the original title is “Skim Reading Is the New Normal. The Effect on Society Is Profound”.
Recommended reading: Talk about reading in contemporary workplace What are they talking about?
More and more people are beginning to use electronic devices to read | Picture from Unsplash, photographer Perfecto Capucine
Reading habits are changing quietly
When you next fly, you can take a good look at the passengers on the plane. You will sendNow babies no longer need pacifiers, but need to watch animations on the iPad. Kindergarten children will read children’s stories on the tablet, and older children will play games on their phones. Mothers may use Kindle books, and fathers read emails and news in their notebooks.
I do n’t know when we started, we are all used to reading on electronic devices. This conversion from paper to electronic screen has virtually created a change in our brain’s reading habits.
Neurologists pointed out that humans have been learning reading and writing since more than six thousand years ago. These two skills have caused qualitative changes in the brain circuit. The synapses in the brain are more closely connected, and human memory has evolved from only remembering “I have a few goats” to being able to read and remember more complicated things.
Deep reading is being abandoned
My research direction is how reading ability (especially in-depth reading) makes people more intelligent, including developing intelligence and perceiving a series of emotions. The brain with reading ability can increase people’s internal knowledge, enhance the ability of analogical reasoning, understand other opinions and generate empathy, and so on. Unfortunately, many studies now show that in the digital age, “deep reading” is being abandoned by more and more people. Our The structure of the brain will change, resulting in a series of important effects.
It should be noted that I do n’t want to make a simple black and white distinction between paper reading and digital reading. My purpose is not to criticize the latest technology. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle wrote, we will encounter problems of one kind or another in the process of innovation. This is not terrible. What is scary is that we have deliberately ignored these problems. , And only focus on the benefits of technology.
We are at a turning point between paper reading and digital reading. Our society needs to understand the various problems that we may have after abandoning paper reading, so as to find solutions before our children have officially started reading. .
Through research, we have learned that reading ability needs to be acquired, which is different from language or senses. Cultivating reading ability requires a certain environment, and readers need to adapt to various elements in the general environment, including text writing format, text medium, language symbols, and so on. If the textThe medium is a variety of screens-on this screen, not only can you read, but you can quickly find new materials, obtain a lot of information, and handle multiple tasks at the same time, so our reading habits will be changed.
As Patricia Greenfield, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) said, in today ’s world, our attention is easily distracted, and more time is spent reading less. Deep time is also essential for a person to develop his reasoning skills, critical thinking, and empathy. No matter what stage in life we need to read in depth.
Picture from Usplash | Photography Aaron Burden
“Unreadable” works a century ago
More and more teachers, psychology and sociology experts have confirmed the above phenomenon.
Mark Edmundson, an English literature research scholar and teacher, said that his students would be very reluctant to read literary works from the nineteenth to the twentieth century, because they no longer have the patience to read the long, intensive , Complex text. Of course, there is a deeper reason behind this impatience: in fact, these students no longer have a high level of reading and analysis skills, so they cannot understand the author’s complex central ideas and arguments. Whether it is a work in the humanities or science, whether it is a will, a contract, or a referendum rule, these complex texts are increasingly beyond the scope of contemporary students.
A number of studies have shown that for high school students and college students, reading on the electronic screen for a long time has caused a lot of trouble. In Stavanger, Norway, the psychologist Anne Mangen (Anne Mangen) and her colleagues did an experiment to allow two groups of high school students to read the same text using different media. The text chosen by Mangen is a short love story that is very popular among students. She asked a group of students to read on a Kindle and another group of students to read on paper. The results showed that the paper-read group clearly understood the story better than the Kindle group. The former is more accurate in retelling the plot, explaining the relationship between the characters and chronological order.
Liu Zi of San Jose State UniversityZiming Liu also conducted a series of studies, showing that contemporary people have replaced deep reading with scanning in the process of reading. When encountering unrecognized words or complex text, people tend to skip rather than stop Thinking, consulting.
Many readers begin to adopt the “from F to Z” reading mode. They will look at the first line first, and then browse through it, only grab a few keywords in the text. When the brain starts to read in this way, the reading time is compressed and deep reading becomes impossible. In other words, we no longer have time to delve into complex texts, to feel the author’s emotions, to explore the beauty from different perspectives, and to review our feelings when reading.
Untouchable text
Karin Littau and Andrew Piper added a reason for the change in reading habits: senses also affect reading habits . Their team found through research that reading paper-based text can allow fingers to touch the printed text, thereby enhancing the understanding of the information. Through the “touch text” at the physical level, readers can better perceive these texts and absorb them into their minds.
Piper pointed out that human beings need to constantly check their position in the two coordinates of time and space. To check whether you are improving. However, the electronic screen is different from the paper text, it may not be saved, so that you can take the text back to review at a moment you want to review.
American media researchers Lisa Guernsey and Michael Levine, linguist Naomi Baron and cognitive scientist Tami Kazir Katzir), these few people have studied the impact of digital reading on people, especially the impact on young people.
Kazir ’s research found that the negative effects of digital reading will appear in the fourth to fifth grades at the earliest. These children not only have poor comprehension, but also have some empathy.
I need to emphasize again that digital reading may cause a lack of critical thinking and empathy, but this is not to simply contrast paper reading with digital reading. I hope to tell you through this article that when we switch from one medium to another, we not only change the medium itself, but also the reading habits of our brains. And this is not just for young people, because the shrinking of empathy and critical thinking willAffects all of us: it affects our ability to resist information bombardment, allows us to accept untested information without reservation, and allows each of us to live on an island of information, false or possessed by ourselves Provocative content packages.
Use your brain!
There is such a principle in neurology: your brain will not shrink due to age, but if you do n’t use it, it will shrink. This principle gives us hope to some extent: when our brain reads with critical thinking, we have the opportunity to use the brain, which shows that even in the digital age, we still have choices.
I believe that reading habits will change further in the future. The science and technology we have is profoundly changing the habits we have accumulated over the centuries. If we realize what kind of ability this transformation will make us lose, and take measures to protect this ability, and at the same time enjoy the convenience brought by technology, we have the opportunity to cultivate a kind of “double brain”: this kind of brain, On the one hand, it can be rooted in traditional in-depth reading, on the other hand, it can also do the necessary efficient reading in the digital age.
After we have mastered this in-depth thinking and efficient scanning ability, we can make the most rational choices for this society as citizens. Our children and grandchildren have the ability to experience and create beautiful works, and we ourselves You can get through the chaotic information, obtain the necessary knowledge, and gain real wisdom.
Translator: Michiko