Reading This Will Change Your Brain
Oh good. The internet is making us more shallow – and possibly more stupid.
As you read this, your brain is weighing up whether to click off, click through, scroll down, change tabs, swipe screens or walk away from the computer. Yes, you are reading; but you are doing many other things as well. That is changing how you engage with this text, and therefore what you understand and remember, as well as the detail in which you do so. And that, in turn, is changing how you habitually think. Just reading this is changing your brain.
Ask someone why she prefers books to e-books and she will probably shrug. ‘It’s the smell of a book,’ she might say; or: ‘I spend enough time looking at screens.’ Both perfectly valid reasons, of course, but the instinct that print books are better than their digital siblings is supported by hard, empirical proof. Reading print engages the parts of the brain associated with language, memory and visual processing, but not much else. In contrast, reading on the internet engages just these regions and the parts of the brain associated with decision-making and problem-solving. But this isn’t a good thing. Owing to the sheer volume of information your brain has to grapple with, you enjoy reading less, you find it more difficult, and you remember less. It is almost impossible for you to read deeply – to ‘lose yourself’ in a book, as you can with print.
Reading on the internet engages just these regions and the parts of the brain associated with decision-making and problem-solving. But this isn’t a good thing.
Over time, but not that much time at all, this changes your brain. Every time you read on the internet, electrical pulses travel from your brain cells via those cells’ axons across a small gap called a synapse to other cells’ dendrites, which receive the signals. Each time this process repeats, the connection between those cells gets stronger, and the process becomes more efficient. ‘Neurons that wire together, fire together,’ as the saying goes. In other words: you get more efficient at what you do, whatever you do. You get more efficient at being anxious every time you feel anxious. You get more efficient at playing tennis every time you play tennis. And every time you read online, you get more efficient at thinking in the way that reading on the internet makes you think.
In his brilliant book, The Shallows, Nicholas Carr describes how it was once believed that hyperlinks would improve the reading experience and comprehension by freeing the reader from ‘materiality’. They have damaged both. Carr also cites the findings of the UX consultant Jakob Nielsen, who concluded after decades of study that it is not just that internet users don’t read well: to a great extent, they don’t read at all. Rather, they look, or ‘scan’ pages for salient information, spending vanishingly little time on each page before clicking off. Due to neuroplasticity – that neurons that fire together, wire together – we are getting shallower as we read in a more and more shallow way.
Jakob Nielsen concluded after decades of study that it is not just that internet users don’t read well: to a great extent, they don’t read at all.
But IQ keeps rising! you cry. Which is true. IQ is rising, as it has done every decade since we began to measure it. Yet there are qualifying factors: most of the gains in IQ have come in specific sections of the test – those measuring shape recognition, arrangement and logic. In tests of memorisation, vocabulary, general knowledge and basic arithmetic there has been little or no improvement at all. Scores are also falling across the maths, critical reading and writing sections of the United States’ PSAT exam, as well as the verbal and reading sections of the SAT exam.
All this is inconvenient. The internet is fun to use. Reading on your phone is also quite a bit easier than lugging around a great big tome everywhere you go. But if we want to think deeply and creatively, get things done, nourish our empathy, lose ourselves in other worlds, improve our verbal fluency, remember what we read, and bring real joy back to reading, we cannot do it on a screen. We have to go back to that brilliant invention of the Romans, made widely available by Johannes Gutenberg: the book.
