Your Brain on 'Deep Reading'

Thanks to Margie Carter for highlighting a recent New York Times article and episode of The Ezra Klein show entitled, “This is Your Brain on ‘Deep Reading.’ It’s Pretty Magnificent” In line with our recent ExchangeEveryDay on One Internet Minute, the introduction asks, “What are we actually getting from [taking in over 34 gigabytes of information a day]? How is it affecting our memories, our attention spans, our ability to think? What might this mean for today’s children, and future generations? And what does it take to read—and think—deeply in a world so flooded with constant input?”

In the audio show, Ezra Klein and UCLA researcher Maryanne Wolfe “discuss why reading is a fundamentally ‘unnatural’ act, how scanning and scrolling differ from ‘deep reading,’ why it’s not accurate to say that ‘reading’ is just one thing, how our brains process information differently when we’re reading on a Kindle or a laptop as opposed to a physical book, how exposure to such an abundance of information is rewiring our brains and reshaping our society, how to rediscover the lost art of reading books deeply, what Wolf recommends to those of us who struggle against digital distractions, what parents can do to protect their children’s attention, how Wolf’s theory of a ‘biliterate brain’ may save our species’ ability to deeply process language and information and more.”

Listen in and see why, in Wolfe’s view, “our era of information overload represents a historical inflection point where our ability to read — truly, deeply read, not just scan or scroll — hangs in the balance.”

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