CHAPTER FOUR
Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading
In the West End of Provincetown there’s a gorgeous bookstore named Tim’s Used Books. You walk in and you immediately inhale the tangy must that comes from having old books stacked everywhere. I went in almost every other day that summer to buy another book to read. There was a young woman who worked at the cash register who was really smart, and I took to chatting with her. I noticed that every time I went in, she was reading a different book—one day Vladimir Nabokov, another day Joseph Conrad, another day Shirley Jackson. Wow, I said, you read fast. Oh, she replied, I don’t. I can only read the first chapter or two of a book. I asked: Really? Why? She said: I guess I can’t focus. Here was an intelligent young woman with lots of time, surrounded by many of the best books ever written, and with a desire to read them—but she could only get through the first chapter or two, and then her attention puttered out, like a failing engine.
I have lost count of how many people I know who have told me this. When I first met him, David Ulin, who was a book critic and editor at the Los Angeles Times for more than thirty years, told me that he had lost his ability to read deeply over long periods, because whenever he tried to settle down, he kept being drawn back to the buzz of the online conversation. This is an incredibly smart man whose whole life had been dedicated to books. It was disconcerting.
The proportion of Americans who read books for pleasure is now at its lowest level ever recorded. The American Time Use Survey—which studies a representative sample of 26,000 Americans—found that between 2004 and 2017 the proportion of men reading for pleasure had fallen by 40 percent, while for women, it was down by 29 percent. The opinion-poll company Gallup found that the proportion of Americans who never read a book in any given year tripled between 1978 and 2014. Some 57 percent of Americans now do not read a single book in a typical year. This has escalated to the point that by 2017, the average American spent seventeen minutes a day reading books and 5.4 hours on their phone. Complex literary fiction is particularly suffering. For the first time in modern history, less than half of Americans read literature for pleasure. It’s been less well studied, but there seem to be similar trends in Britain and other countries: between 2008 and 2016 the market for novels fell by 40 percent. In one single year—2011—paperback fiction sales collapsed by 26 percent.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book—and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we experience—you dedicate many hours of your life, coolly, calmly, to one topic, and allow it to marinate in your mind. This is the medium through which most of the deepest advances in human thought over the past four hundred years have been figured out and explained. And that experience is now in free fall.
In Provincetown I noticed I wasn’t just reading more—I was reading differently. I was becoming much more deeply immersed in the books I had chosen. I got lost in them for really long stretches, sometimes whole days—and I felt like I was understanding and remembering more of what I read. It seemed like I traveled farther in that deck chair by the sea, reading book after book, than I had in the previous five years of shuttling frantically around the world. I went from fighting on the battlefields of the Napoleonic Wars, to being an enslaved person in the Deep South, to being an Israeli mother trying to avoid hearing the news that her son has been killed. As I reflected on this, I started to think again about a book I had read ten years before: The Shallows by Nicholas Carr—a landmark work that really alerted people to a crucial aspect of the growing attention crisis. He warned that the way we are reading seems to be changing as we migrate to the internet—so I went back to one of the key experts he drew on, to see what they have learned since.
Anne Mangen is a professor of literacy at the University of Stavanger in Norway, and she explained to me that in two decades of researching this subject, she has proved something crucial. Reading books trains us to read in a particular way—in a linear fashion, focused on one thing for a sustained period. Reading from screens, she has discovered, trains us to read in a different way—in a manic skip and jump from one thing to another. “We’re more likely to scan and skim” when we read on screens, her studies have found—we run our eyes rapidly over the information to extract what we need. But after a while, if we do this long enough, she told me, “this scanning and skimming bleeds over. It also starts to color or influence how we read on paper…. That behavior also becomes our default, more or less.” It was precisely what I had noticed when I tried to settle into Dickens when I arrived in Provincetown and found myself rushing ahead of him, as if it was a news article and I was trying to push for the key facts.
This creates a different relationship with reading. It stops being a form of pleasurable immersion in another world and becomes more like dashing around a busy supermarket to grab what you need and then get out again. When this flip takes place—when our screen-reading contaminates our book-reading—we lose some of the pleasures of reading books themselves, and they become less appealing.
It has other knock-on effects. Anne has conducted studies that split people into two groups, where one is given information in a printed book, and the other is given the same information on a screen. Everyone is then asked questions about what they just read. When you do this, you find that people understand and remember less of what they absorb on screens. There’s broad scientific evidence for this now, emerging from fifty-four studies, and she explained that it’s referred to as “screen inferiority.” This gap in understanding between books and screens is big enough that in elementary-school children, it’s the equivalent of two-thirds of a year’s growth in reading comprehension.
As she spoke, I realized that the collapse in reading books is in some ways a symptom of our atrophying attention, and in some ways a cause of it. It’s a spiral—as we began to move from books to screens, we started to lose some of the capacity for the deeper reading that comes from books, and that, in turn, made us less likely to read books. It’s like when you gain weight, and it gets harder and harder to exercise. As a result, Anne told me, she is worried we are now losing “our ability to read long texts anymore,” and we are also losing our “cognitive patience…[and] the stamina and the ability to deal with cognitively challenging texts.” When I was at Harvard conducting interviews, one professor told me that he struggled to get his students there to read even quite short books, and he increasingly offered them podcasts and YouTube clips they could watch instead. And that’s Harvard. I started to wonder what happens to a world where this form of deep focus shrinks so far and so fast. What happens when that deepest layer of thinking becomes available to fewer and fewer people, until it is a small minority interest, like opera, or volleyball?
As I wandered the streets of Provincetown contemplating some of these questions, I found myself thinking back over a famous idea that I now realized I had never really understood before—one that was also mulled, in a different way, by Nicholas Carr in his book. In the 1960s, the Canadian professor Marshall McLuhan talked a lot about how the arrival of television was transforming the way we see the world. He said these changes were so deep and so profound that it was hard to really see them. When he tried to distill this down into a phrase, he explained that “the medium is the message.” What he meant, I think, was that when a new technology comes along, you think of it as like a pipe—somebody pours in information at one end, and you receive it unfiltered at the other. But it’s not like that. Every time a new medium comes along—whether it’s the invention of the printed book, or TV, or Twitter—and you start to use it, it’s like you are putting on a new kind of goggles, with their own special colors and lenses. Each set of goggles you put on makes you see things differently.
So (for example) when you start to watch television, before you absorb the message of any particular TV show—whether it’s Wheel of Fortune or The Wire—you start to see the world as being shaped like television itself. That’s why McLuhan said that every time a new medium comes along—a new way for humans to communicate—it has buried in it a message. It is gently guiding us to see the world according to a new set of codes. The way information gets to you, McLuhan argued, is more important than the information itself. TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it’s about surfaces and appearances; that everything in the world is happening all at once.
This made me wonder what the message is that we absorb from social media, and how it compares to the message that we absorb from printed books. I thought first of Twitter. When you log in to that site—it doesn’t matter whether you are Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders or Bubba the Love Sponge—you are absorbing a message through that medium and sending it out to your followers. What is that message? First: you shouldn’t focus on any one thing for long. The world can and should be understood in short, simple statements of 280 characters. Second: the world should be interpreted and confidently understood very quickly. Third: what matters most is whether people immediately agree with and applaud your short, simple, speedy statements. A successful statement is one that lots of people immediately applaud; an unsuccessful statement is one that people immediately ignore or condemn. When you tweet, before you say anything else, you are saying that at some level you agree with these three premises. You are putting on those goggles and seeing the world through them.
How about Facebook? What’s the message in that medium? It seems to be first: your life exists to be displayed to other people, and you should be aiming every day to show your friends edited highlights of your life. Second: what matters is whether people immediately like these edited and carefully selected highlights that you spend your life crafting. Third: somebody is your “friend” if you regularly look at their edited highlight reels, and they look at yours—this is what friendship means.
How about Instagram? First: what matters is how you look on the outside. Second: what matters is how you look on the outside. Third: what matters is how you look on the outside. Fourth: what matters is whether people like how you look on the outside. (I don’t mean this glibly or sarcastically; that really is the message the site offers.)
I realized one of the key reasons why social media makes me feel so out of joint with the world, and with myself. I think all of these ideas—the messages implicit in these mediums—are wrong. Let’s think about Twitter. In fact, the world is complex. To reflect that honestly, you usually need to focus on one thing for a significant amount of time, and you need space to speak at length. Very few things worth saying can be explained in 280 characters. If your response to an idea is immediate, unless you have built up years of expertise on the broader topic, it’s most likely going to be shallow and uninteresting. Whether people immediately agree with you is no marker of whether what you are saying is true or right—you have to think for yourself. Reality can only be understood sensibly by adopting the opposite messages to Twitter. The world is complex and requires steady focus to be understood; it needs to be thought about and comprehended slowly; and most important truths will be unpopular when they are first articulated. I realized that the times in my own life when I’ve been most successful on Twitter—in terms of followers and retweets—are the times when I have been least useful as a human being: when I’ve been attention-deprived, simplistic, vituperative. Of course there are occasional nuggets of insight on the site—but if this becomes your dominant mode of absorbing information, I believe the quality of your thinking will rapidly degrade.
The same goes for Instagram. I like looking at pretty people, like everyone else. But to think that life is primarily about these surfaces—getting approval for your six-pack or how you look in a bikini—is a recipe for unhappiness. And the same goes for a lot of how we interact on Facebook too. It’s not friendship to pore jealously over another person’s photos and boasts and complaints, and to expect them to do the same for you. In fact, that’s pretty much the opposite of friendship. Being friends is about looking into each other’s eyes, doing things together in the world, an endless exchange of gut laughs and bear hugs, joy and grief and dancing. These are all the things Facebook will often drain from you by dominating your time with hollow parodies of friendship.
After thinking all this, I would return to the printed books I was piling up against the wall of my beach house. What, I wondered, is the message buried in the medium of the printed book? Before the words convey their specific meaning, the medium of the book tells us several things. Firstly, life is complex, and if you want to understand it, you have to set aside a fair bit of time to think deeply about it. You need to slow down. Secondly, there is a value in leaving behind your other concerns and narrowing down your attention to one thing, sentence after sentence, page after page. Thirdly, it is worth thinking deeply about how other people live and how their minds work. They have complex inner lives just like you.
I realized that I agree with the messages in the medium of the book. I think they are true. I think they encourage the best parts of human nature—that a life with lots of episodes of deep focus is a good life. It is why reading books nourishes me. And I don’t agree with the messages in the medium of social media. I think they primarily feed the uglier and shallower parts of my nature. It is why spending time on these sites—even when, by the rules of the game, I am doing well, gaining likes and followers—leaves me feeling drained and unhappy. I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.
But I wondered if I was getting carried away—these were just my hunches, after all—so later, I went to the University of Toronto to interview Raymond Mar, who is a professor of psychology there. Raymond is one of the social scientists who has done most in the world to study the effects that reading books has on our consciousness, and his research has helped to open up a distinctive way of thinking about this question.
When he was a little boy, Raymond read obsessively—but it had never occurred to him to try to figure out how reading itself might affect the way in which our minds work until he was a grad student, and one day, his mentor, Professor Keith Oatley, put a thought to him. When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it’s like to be inside another person’s head. You are simulating a social situation. You are imagining other people and their experiences in a deep and complex way. So maybe, he said, if you read a lot of novels, you will become better at actually understanding other people off the page. Perhaps fiction is a kind of empathy gym, boosting your ability to empathize with other people—which is one of the most rich and precious forms of focus we have. Together, they decided to begin to study this question scientifically.
It’s a tricky thing to study. Some other scientists had developed a technique where you give somebody a passage to read, and then immediately afterward you test their empathy. But to Raymond, this was flawed. If reading affects us, it reshapes us over the longer term—it’s not like taking ecstasy, where you swallow it and experience immediate effects for a few hours.
With his colleagues he came up with a clever three-stage experiment designed to see if this longer-term effect existed. If you took part in the test, you were brought into a lab and you were shown a list of names. Some were famous novelists; some were famous nonfiction writers; and some were random people who weren’t writers at all. You were asked to circle the names of the novelists, and then, separately, you were asked to circle the names of the nonfiction writers. Raymond reasoned that people who had read more novels over their lifetime would be able to recognize the names of more fiction writers. He also now had an interesting comparison group—people who had read a lot of nonfiction books.
Then he gave everyone two tests. The first used a technique that’s sometimes used to diagnose autism. You are shown lots of pictures of people’s eye areas, and you are asked: What is this person thinking? It’s a way of measuring how good you are at reading the subtle signals that reveal the emotional state of another person. In the second test, you sat down and watched several videos of real people in real situations like, for example, two men who had just played a squash game talking to each other. You had to figure out: What’s going on here? Who won the game? What’s the relationship between them? How do they feel? Raymond and the experimenters knew the real answers—and so they could see who, in the test, was best at reading the social signals and figuring them out.
When they got the results, they were clear. The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other people’s emotions. It was a huge effect. This wasn’t just a sign that you were better educated—because reading nonfiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.
I asked Raymond why. Reading, he told me, creates a “unique form of consciousness…. While we’re reading, we’re directing attention outward toward the words on the page and, at the same time, enormous amounts of attention is going inward as we imagine and mentally simulate.” It’s different from if you just close your eyes and try to imagine something off the top of your head. “It’s being structured—but our attention is in a very unique place, fluctuating both out toward the page, toward the words, and then inward, toward what those words represent.” It’s a way of combining “outwardly directed attention and inwardly directed attention.” When you read fiction in particular, you imagine what it is like to be another person. You find yourself, he says, “trying to understand the different characters, their motivations, their goals, tracking those different things. It’s a form of practice. We’re probably using the same kinds of cognitive processes that we would use to understand our real peers in the real world.” You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.
Each of us can only ever experience a small sliver of what it’s like to be a human being alive today, Raymond told me, but as you read fiction, you see inside other people’s experiences. That doesn’t vanish when you put down the novel. When you later meet a person in the real world, you’ll be better able to imagine what it’s like to be them. Reading a factual account may make you more knowledgeable, but it doesn’t have this empathy-expanding effect.
There have now been dozens of other studies replicating the core effect that Raymond discovered. I asked Raymond what would happen if we discovered a drug that boosted empathy as much as reading fiction has been shown to in his work. “If it had no side effects,” he said, “I think that it would be a very popular drug.” The more I talked with him, the more I reflected that empathy is one of the most complex forms of attention we have—and the most precious. Many of the most important advances in human history have been advances in empathy—the realization by at least some white people that other ethnic groups have feelings and abilities and dreams just like them; the realization by some men that the way they have exerted power over women was illegitimate and caused real suffering; the realization by many heterosexuals that gay love is just like straight love. Empathy makes progress possible, and every time you widen human empathy, you open the universe a little more.
But—as Raymond is the first to point out—these results can be interpreted in a very different way. It could be that reading fiction, over time, boosts your empathy. But it could also be that people who are already empathetic are simply more drawn to reading novels. This makes his research controversial, and contested. He told me that it’s likely that both are true—that reading fiction boosts your empathy, and that empathetic people are more drawn to reading fiction. But there’s a hint, he said, that reading fiction really does have a significant effect: one of his studies found that the more a child is read storybooks—something the parents, more than the kid, choose—the better they are at reading other people’s emotions. This suggests that the experience of stories really does expand their empathy.
If we have reasons to believe that reading fiction boosts our empathy, do we know what the forms that are largely replacing it—like social media—are doing to us? Raymond said it’s easy to be snobbish about social media and to fall into a moral panic, and he finds that way of thinking silly. There’s a lot that is good about social media, he stressed. The effects he is describing aren’t to do primarily with the printed page, he said—they are to do with being immersed in a complex narrative that simulates the social world. His studies have found that long TV series are just as effective, he said. But there’s a catch. One of his studies showed that children are more empathetic if they read storybooks or watch movies, but not if they watch shorter shows. This appears to fit, it seemed to me, with what we see on social media—if you see the world through fragments, your empathy often doesn’t kick in, in the way that it does when you engage with something in a sustained, focused way.
As I talked with him, I thought: We internalize the texture of the voices we’re exposed to. When you expose yourself to complex stories about the inner lives of other people over long periods of time, that will repattern your consciousness. You too will become more perceptive, open, and empathetic. If, by contrast, you expose yourself for hours a day to the disconnected fragments of shrieking and fury that dominate social media, your thoughts will start to be shaped like that. Your internal voices will become cruder, louder, less able to hear more tender and gentle thoughts. Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.
Before I said goodbye to Raymond, I asked him why he had spent so much time studying the effects of reading fiction on human consciousness. Up to the moment when I asked this, he had been something of a data geek, explaining his methods in great detail. But as he answered, his face opened up. “We’re all on the same ball of mud and water that is heading toward a catastrophic end potentially. If we are going to solve these problems, we can’t do it alone,” he said. “That’s why I think empathy is so valuable.”