< Maryanne Wolf >

learning to think in a digital world

Originally published in the Boston Globe (September 5, 2007).

MARYANNE WOLF is a professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University. She is the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (2007) and the RAVE-O Intervention Program, a fluency comprehension program for struggling readers. She was awarded the Distinguished Professor of the Year Award from the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and also the Teaching Excellence Award from the American Psychological Association.

AS PARENTS INVEST in the latest academic software and teachers consider how to weave the Internet into lesson plans for the new school year, it is a good moment to reflect upon the changing world in which youths are being educated. In a word, it is digital, with computer notebooks displacing spiraled notebooks, and Web-based blogs, articles, and e-mails shaping how we read and communicate. Parents, teachers, and scholars are beginning to question how our immersion in this increasingly digital world will shape the next generation’s relationship to reading, learning, and to knowledge itself.

As a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading, I am particularly concerned with the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society. Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips. Over the last five thousand years, the acquisition of reading transformed the neural circuitry of the brain and the intellectual development of the species. Yet, the reading brain is slowly becoming endangered—the unforeseen consequences of the transition to a digital epoch that is affecting every aspect of our lives, including the intellectual development of each new reader. Three unexpected sources can help us negotiate the historical transition we face as we move from one prevailing mode of communication to another: Socrates, modern cognitive neuroscience, and Proust.

Similarly poised between two modes of communication, one oral and one written, Socrates argued against the acquisition of literacy. His arguments are as prescient today as they were futile then. At the core of Socrates’ arguments lay his concerns for the young. He believed that the seeming permanence of the printed word would delude them into thinking they had accessed the heart of knowledge, rather than simply decoded it. To Socrates, only the arduous process of probing, analyzing, and ultimately internalizing knowledge would enable the young to develop a lifelong approach to thinking that would lead them ultimately to wisdom, virtue, and “friendship with [their] god.” To Socrates, only the examined word and the “examined life” were worth pursuing, and literacy short-circuited both.

How many children today are becoming Socrates’ nightmare, decoders of information who have neither the time nor the motivation to think beneath or beyond their Googled universes? Will they become so accustomed to immediate access to escalating on-screen information that they will fail to probe beyond the information given to the deeper layers of insight, imagination, and knowledge that have led us to this stage of human thought? Or, will the new demands of information technologies to multitask, integrate, and prioritize vast amounts of information help to develop equally, if not more, valuable skills that will increase human intellectual capacities, quality of life, and collective wisdom as a species?

There is surprisingly little research that directly confronts these questions, but knowledge from the neurosciences about how the brain learns to read and how it learns to think about what it reads can aid our efforts. We know, for example, that no human being was born to read. We can do so only because of our brain’s protean capacity to rearrange itself to learn something new. Using neuroimaging to scan the brains of novice readers allows us to observe how a new neural circuitry is fashioned from some of its original structures. In the process, that brain is transformed in ways we are only now beginning to fully appreciate. More specifically, in the expert reading brain, the first milliseconds of decoding have become virtually automatic within that circuit. It is this automaticity that allows us the precious milliseconds we need to go beyond the decoded text to think new thoughts of our own—the heart of the reading process.

Perhaps no one was more eloquent about the true purpose of reading than French novelist Marcel Proust, who wrote: “that which is the end of their [the authors’] wisdom is but the beginning of ours.” The act of going beyond the text to think new thoughts is a developmental, learnable approach toward knowledge.

Within this context, there should be a developmental perspective on our transition to a digital culture. Our already biliterate children, who nimbly traverse between various modes of print, need to develop an expert reading brain before they become totally immersed in the digital world. Neuroscience shows us the profound miracle of an expert reading brain that uses untold areas across all four lobes and both hemispheres to comprehend sophisticated text and to think new thoughts that go beyond the text.

Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge. As technological visionary Edward Tenner cautioned, “It would be a shame if the very intellect that produced the digital revolution could be destroyed by it.” Socrates, Proust, and the images of the expert reading brain help us to think more deliberately about the choices we possess as our next generation moves toward the next great epoch in our intellectual development.