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EdSurge
Reading Fuels Empathy. Do Screens Threaten
That?
By Sydney Johnson
Feb 18, 2019
Reading changes our brains. Beyond allowing humans to gather and
synthesize new information, research shows it is key to cultivating
empathy in individuals, too. One study finds this to be particularly
true for fictional stories, which allow readers to imagine themselves
as other people, in other worlds, with different ideas and challenges.
The effects of reading on the brain are also strongly influenced by the
medium through which we read. For a long time, that has been print. And
so as digital screens begin to take the place of print books in many
classrooms and households, researchers are now looking at how that
impacts our ability to process information—and empathize with others.
That was the focus of a talk at the Learning and the Brain conference
in San Francisco this week delivered by Maryanne Wolf, director of the
Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the
University of California, Los Angeles. Wolf started off by explaining
to an audience of educators and neuroscientists that the human brain
wasn’t made to read. Rather, “when the brain has to learn something
new, it creates a new circuit, and that’s what reading does,” explained
Wolf, who authored the book “Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a
Digital World.”
In other words, there’s no part of the brain that was designed to read.
Instead, making sense of characters and symbols requires the brain to
call on other parts of the organ, like the visual cortex, that are used
to identify objects or faces. “We take those neurons and we re-propose
them so people learn letter patterns and that becomes represented in
the back of our brain,” Wolf said.
The way brains create those new neural circuits to read varies
depending on the medium a person reads through. A growing body of
research shows that reading on print versus digital reflects
differently in the brain. And that can have good and bad implications.
Having 24/7 access to screens and the internet makes it easy to quickly
find information. And Wolf said that this has a tremendous effect on
attention that “will inevitably have a change in our ability to
consolidate memory.”
It also changes the way we read. Ziming Liu, a professor of library and
information science at San Jose State University, for example, found
that skimming is more common in the digital age, along with shortened
attention while reading.
Wolf goes a step further: “We don’t just skim. When we are inundated
and bombarded [by digital information] we go to the familiar silos of
information, those that are less dense, and we allow others to think
for ourselves. We go to what confirms our previous thought, rather than
be cognitively challenged by new thoughts, whether it be newspapers or
different media.”
Wolf suggests that one of the threats of this shift is that it will
hurt humans’ ability for deep reading, which she describes as involving
empathy, background knowledge, critical analysis, imagery and
reflection. For example, rather than having to research and remember
background knowledge, webpages that can provide extra context are now a
click away.
This loss of deep reading then poses a threat to the ability to think
critically and empathize with others, Wolf argues. “This isn’t just
about the reading brain, this is about democracy,” said Wolf. “The sum
of these processes helps prepare citizens to be critical thinkers and
empathetic—or not.”
A common perception is that younger generations who grow up exposed to
technology and reading on screens would comprehend what they read
digitally better than someone who grew up with less exposure to
screens. But that’s not always the case, Wolf said, and even for
so-called digital natives, comprehension can still be stronger when
reading print.
Removing technology isn’t part of Wolf’s solution. Part of her own work
involves studying how technology can help individuals with dyslexia or
increase global literacy. “It’s not digital versus print, tradition
versus innovation,” she said. “It’s understanding cognitively and
effectively what are the implications for reading and thinking for both
mediums.”
Wolf instead wants to see a future where humans are “bi-literate,”
meaning capable of deep thought when reading from print or digital,
Wolf penned in an op-ed for the Guardian in 2018.
“We are in this moment where ‘other’ is becoming a threat,” Wolf said
on Saturday. “The compassionate imagination of childhood begins with
understanding that there are others outside of ourselves. We have never
needed the role of story more than right now for our children to
understand a compassionate sense.”
Read this and other articles at EdSurge
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