Category: Lit/Pub

Neuroscience of the Gist

If I hadn’t given up regular TV watching about 20 years ago, I’d probably still be channel-surfing into oblivion.  You’ve been there, right?  Whatever you’re watching can’t possibly be as good or important as whatever you’re missing.  With hundreds of available channels, this is just mathematically reasonable in a very frustrating way.  Maybe, but it’s also an example of how technological access to more can make a person so distracted that he winds up investing time in nothing.  Thankfully, on-demand options for home viewing of filmed media have obviated the need for me ever to channel-surf, but then the Internet and social media came along and brought a whole new ADD-like experience to our lives.

Enter the Facebook feed and Tweetdecks and all those stories of great interest shared by people you love, trust, admire, etc.  There’s no way any of us is reading all of those stories unless we have nothing else to do, so do we pick and choose among them? Or do we just gloss over nearly all of it?  And is all this glossing — my friend calls it “gisting” — better than ignoring the apparently substantive content altogether and sticking to a favored news source. Is skimming over fragments of stories actually changing our brains?  According to cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf, all this gisting may be harming our ability to engage in what she calls “deep reading.”

In this interview, Wolf talks to Robin Young, co-host of the NPR program Here & Now.  To quote:

YOUNG: You had a great line. You said TV produced soundbite culture; online reading is producing eyebite culture.

WOLF: Yes, I’m afraid that what we’re becoming is so inured to seizing the most salient word that we are literally eliminating the music, the thoughts in between those words, some of the most precious aspects of written language.

Wolf wonders if we are not evolving what Young summarizes in her intro as “digital brains.”  And I think this is more than just a generic term for our times, but is rather an appropriate reference for precisely what Dr. Wolf feels may be lost if what we’re witnessing is really a stage in evolution.

If you think about what any audiophile will tell you is wrong with digital music, it’s that all sorts of nuance no longer exists for the contemporary listener to a typical MP3, for example.  Overtones, undertones, and various other sounds are far too subtle to be captured by mass-production, digital sampling; and in a very similar way it seems to me, Wolf is concerned that our own habit of sampling disparate text might make us deaf to the music of written language or at least impatient with it.  Wolf describes her own experience after a period of 5 to 8 hours of screen-reading per day and being unable to return to a favored novel by Herman Hesse.  She states that it took two weeks of purposeful effort to reform those temporarily dormant connections in her brain.

Wolf is less concerned with adults than with children who have yet to build that neurological foundation, which  enables us not only to engage with richer texts, but even to enjoy them.  To hear the whole symphony, if you will.  She is quick to say that she does not advocate turning back the clock and cutting kids off from technology.  “We have to equip our children with 21st-century skills. But at the same time, we must know how to form those reading circuits that allow what I call deep reading. It takes years to form in a child, and it takes milliseconds in us to use. And those milliseconds don’t just come naturally; we have to learn to use them.”

Toby Mundy’s Defense of Books

I draw your attention to this wonderfully unsentimental yet passionate defense of books by Toby Mundy.  The publisher at Atlantic Books, Mundy offers his personal views on the devaluation of the medium for the thought-provoking site Medium.com.  Specifically, of course, he draws our attention to Amazon and its Wal-Mart-like ability to muscle publishers (and by extension authors) into lowering prices toward the existential threshold.  But from a cultural perspective, Mundy makes a sound plea to consumers not to confuse the book with the information it contains and, thus, not to be lulled by artificially cheap prices into setting fire to the basic economics that make a diversity of books possible.  Mundy writes:

“To price a book in the way information is priced is based on a rather one-eyed view of its value. As any textbook author will tell you, Information is undoubtedly part of a book’s utility. But that is only part of the story. A second purpose is to provide readers with transporting Experiences, usually from reading fiction. A third is to impart current Knowledge. When TS Eliot asked plaintively in ‘The Rock’, ‘Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?’ he was reminding us that these two things are not the same. Knowledge comes from the interpretation of information, experience and facts. It comes from the stories we tell about those things. Perhaps it is the capacity to create these stories that make us human.”

By contrast, Mundy opens his piece quoting Russell Grandinetti, Amazon’s VP for Kindle, who accurately says that books compete for our time with other things like Facebook, Twitter, and Candy Crush Saga.  But this somewhat common market view is only a half truth whose half-lie leaves out exactly the point.  There may be individuals who read books and play Candy Crush Saga, but I am confident that they do not value both equally.

See Toby Mundy’s full editorial here.

NPR Reports Teens Reading Less

It’s a longstanding cliché we parents repeat that our kids can have more fun with a box than with the toy that comes in the box.  It’s still true, and we still don’t trust our own wisdom in this regard because presenting a kid with an empty box for his birthday or some other occasion is a risky bet that I personally have yet to make with any of my own kids.  I’m also as guilty as many parents out there who’ve gifted children with tablet “readers” that are admittedly used most of the time for every feature they offer except reading.  We do limit our kids’ time with devices and computers, and when they have to read or choose to read, they still pick up physical books most of the time.  This is partly because we just happen to have a lot of books in the house, but there remains something to be said for narrowing the range of options in one’s periphery or at one’s fingertips in order to derive the most enriching experiences.  Sometimes, you just gotta sit and study the empty box for a moment before you discover its many possibilities.

This story from NPR reports that reading among teens has sharply declined over the last decade, according to a study by Common Sense Media.  Jennifer Ludden’s report emphasizes the need for parental involvement in helping kids learn to moderate their use of devices that offer so many attractive diversions and eat up time that might be spent exclusively reading.  The story caught my attention of course because it is yet another example of why more access to something like literature does not automatically result in an increased benefit to society.  Technology companies that want to scan every book ever written “for the greater good,” and copyright critics who cry foul over the volumes of works not yet in the public domain are ignoring the fact that society will not necessarily behave according to the idealism they promote.  Personally, I don’t think it’s counterintuitive that more books more cheaply available through more portals can fail to produce more literacy.  There are too many factors at play that determine a teenager’s or young adult’s choice to read for pleasure, and the many diversions offered by eReaders and other devices is just one of these factors.  I’d certainly stop short of outright blaming digital technology for driving down reading; but at the same time, anyone who says more has to be made available for the “good of the people” is either very naive or more likely has a multi-million-dollar axe he’s looking to grind.