Neuroplasticity, and the Art and Joy of Deep Reading

 Neuroplasticity

 and the Art and Joy of Reading

I first came across the term neuroplasticity when I was researching how the brain rewires itself as PD kills off neurons tied to dopamine usage in critical bodily functions. Up until recently the brain was thought to put most of its growth early in life and that our brain growth generally peaked around 25 or maybe as late 45 years and then began the slow but steady decline until we died.  Both of these beliefs have turned out to be myths.

The human brain is quite a marvel and with the discovery of neuroplasticity, we now understand the brain to be ever malleable and adaptive to changes it experiences.  People with PD come to really appreciate the ability as when PD kills off say, a neuro-pathway used to route signals between the leg and the brain needed to coordinate smooth walking and balancing, the brain responds by taking neuro pathways that were used in some other capacity and rewiring them assist in keeping your brain and your legs on the same page.  The work-around usually isn't as efficient as the original setup, but it's a good substitute.  This can't go on indefinitely but while it can, the PD progresses at a much slower rate.

I was reading the unedited version of "The Ezra Klein Show" where Ezra interviews Mary Wolf who is one of world's leading experts on what goes on in the brain when we read.  Maryanne Wolf is a professor at U.C.L.A. School of Education and Information Studies, and she’s one of the world’s leading experts on how reading works in and — even more importantly — how it works on the brain, how it changes the brain. She’s the author of “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World,” among other books.

Reading hold a very special place in my heart.  Reading, deep reading in particular, is a powerful tool available to most all of humankind.  To master the skills of deep reading is to liberate ourselves from the manipulations of our politicians and influencers in the marketplace.  To deep read is to know. To know is to create your own opinion, your own worldview. Maryanne states that with vast increase in the amount of information presented to us daily, combined with being of the mindset that "you can never have too much information", we have to a large extent shifted to skimming what we read.  This impacts what we absorb and how we write, it impacts our minds, the very way we think, the way we interpret and reflect on the world.  This change as happened in the blink of an eye.  We need to remember this great literacy experiment humankind is running on itself has no one at the helm and nobody knows what it will do to humankind.

No one is suggesting, nor is it even possible to put this genie back in it's bottle.  Instead we need to develop what Maryanne describes as a biliterate brain.  This is especially necessary in our children as they never had the environment that allowed the brain to develop under  the influence of deep reading.

  

MARYANNE WOLF: No anger. Actually total appreciation for the essay you wrote in August, “The Medium Really Is the Message.”

EZRA KLEIN: Well, I appreciate that. And we’re going to talk about McLuhan, and the mediums are the messages, but I want to start here. You argue in “Reader Come Home” that reading is a, quote, “unnatural process.” Tell me what you mean by that.

MARYANNE WOLF: Well, one of the striking insights that I had, if you will, a tiny epiphany when I first began to write about reading, which was in 2007, it was a book called, “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” I realized that there was nothing in the brain, not a single gene, not a single region that was specifically there for reading. That’s very unlike all the other processes that are actually incorporated in reading: language, vision, cognition, affect.

If you think about language, that is a natural process. There’s a genetic program in which it unfolds. There’s nothing like that for reading. We were never meant to read. But what is amazing is that the brain does have this almost semi-miraculous capacity to make new circuits within itself using the processes that are genetically there but in new ways. So what the brain has is the capacity to make novel circuits. And the invention, the human invention of reading, required a new circuit. So the brain very gradually learned how to connect parts that were there for other reasons and made a new circuit that became the first underlying network for reading very simple symbols 6,000 years ago. But it was never the case that we were meant to read, which has real implications.

Now, Ezra, the reason why it is essential to understand it’s unnatural is that that circuit that is formed, that novel circuit, is plastic. And that’s what makes it very different from the other wonderful processes we were given by nature.

EZRA KLEIN: Well, one of the things I want to get at here, before we get into plasticity and flexibility, but without getting too deep into the neuroscience, one of the things that your book emphasizes and that you convinced me of is that reading is a very misleading term because it’s singular. And you make this point that reading is not one thing at all, it’s many things. So tell me a bit about that multiplicity.

MARYANNE WOLF: So, I will return a little back to neuroscience only as a way of scaffolding what I’m going to say. And that is when we first learn to read we have this most basic circuit. It’s just putting together the visual processes that identify a letter or a character with a word, with what we know about the word. So it’s putting vision and language together. That’s one form of reading. That’s a very basic form of what we would call decoding. But from then on, according to our environment, we begin to elaborate that circuit. And so we become prepared, if you will, to read in totally different ways from that very simplified form of reading, which we call decoding.

And the more we know, the more we add to that circuit. So the more we have as background knowledge, we are preparing that circuit to grow in ever more sophisticated ways. Now, the most interesting aspect for me about reading is that it’s continuous, it’s evolving, it’s based on everything that went before. Or it can be a very primitive way of using that decoding circuit so that we just are skimming the top, if you will, of the processes and we get the information and we have a very basic content.

But if over time, we have begun to elaborate this brain so that it includes deep reading, the unnatural apex of the achievement of reading is what deep reading provides. And that means there are different levels in which we can participate in the text. We can use our ability to take on another perspective to read in a whole different way. We are entering almost like the theory of mind of another and also their feelings. This is a totally different form of reading than the one that we are talking about when we are saying we read for information.

Now, I can go and will go further into what’s even, if you will, deeper than critical analysis and empathy. But the accrual of all these more sophisticated processes means that we can read at multiple levels. We can read with our attention simply skimming the surface. And that’s part of why Nicholas Carr used the term “shallows.” That’s why some of my colleagues in Norway even talk about the “shallowing hypothesis.” Many, many of us have, if you will, regressed to that earliest form of reading, in which we are barely skimming the surface of what we read, barely consolidating it in memory, and we are, in fact, reading less of what is there as a result.

EZRA KLEIN: I’m really trying to decide if I want to keep the structure I had intended here or jump around a bit. So let me say this, because maybe it’s a good way of signposting where I’m going for everybody listening. I’m interested in your work, and I’m interested in this conversation because I’m interested in the states you can achieve while reading.

And we talk about reading typically in terms of the content, as if the question of reading is what you read. And what your work is getting at is that at least as important a question is how you read, the process by which you read, the distractions, the physical formats, the qualities and levels of attention you bring. And this gets to something that you pointed it a little minute or two ago, which is plasticity. Talk a bit about plasticity and its relationship to reading.

MARYANNE WOLF: The most important two words that I will use in this next part of the discussion are attention, the quality of attention, and insight, epiphany. There is a quick line between attention and shallow memory that is possible because we have a plastic brain. It doesn’t tell us exactly what to do; rather, this plasticity is dependent on the medium in which we read, the language or writing system, orthography, in which we read, and even the educational background that taught us how to read in particular ways.

Now, I bring us back to the two words attention and insight. Plasticity means that the way we read will be reflecting the affordances of the medium. This was the point that McLuhan made, his student Walter Ong made, certainly Postman made, as you indicated in your August essay. All of these people were onto the basic principle that how we read on a medium changes what we discern, what we comprehend.

Now, I’m going to push just slightly this plasticity into the affordances of digital versus print. The affordances of the digital screen are really exciting. They help us skim the extraordinary voluminous nature of information that’s out there. Skimming is a defense mechanism that’s very useful. We can handle so much information. And your job, Ezra, and mine, involves six to 10 hours a day of sampling information, if you will. Making sure we’re aware. But how we are reading it will change the nature of what we have absorbed.

And many people are asking me — in fact, I did an NPR program on why people don’t feel the same impressiveness in the reading experience. And it’s very simple. Because the affordances of the digital medium, which enhance the speed in which we’re reading and focusing on vast amounts of information, multitasking and being entertained, if you will, being engaged at that level. All of that actually takes away from the ability to use the full circuitry — the full circuitry which includes using your background knowledge to infer, to deduce the truth value, to feel what that author is feeling in a work of fiction, to understand a completely different perspective.

All of that takes time. The print mediums affordances advantage the giving, the allocation of time to words, concepts in a way that when we skim we simply don’t have the same amount of time to process. So plasticity changes the nature of attention. Attention is very sophisticated and complex. But the amount of attention that we have is going to be influenced by all the distractions that you just discussed as you framed my question. But it will lead, ultimately, to the diminution of the time necessary for the insights at the end.

EZRA KLEIN: I want to step away from for a minute the digital versus print. Because before we get there, I want to get a little bit more into this idea. It’s not just that mediums change us — I was thinking about this language. It’s that habits change us. It’s at what we do again and again changes us. So you have the term in your book, use it or lose it, for something maybe as unnatural, as you put it, as reading. Maybe a way of thinking about it is, build it or lose it. But give me some examples of skills that we can strengthen or that we can weaken depending on how we read.

MARYANNE WOLF: We develop, call it habits, I call it mind-sets, in which we develop a way of doing things. With our background in print, we developed a very particular mind-set that you possess, Ezra, and I as what we were, if you will, formed. That’s how we were formed as readers. I call this moment in time technologically a hinge moment. As we’ve moved to the other side of that hinge moment, we have made our habit of reading largely on screens.

So imperceptibly we are developing a mind-set or habit of reading in a particular way that, by and large, is based on a kind of skimming reading. Again, because of all the information we have to process in any given day. So the habit or mind-set is now so largely influenced by us reading on screens that we take that mind-set, even back to print. We can build habits of mind, a kind of reading that’s after the innermost landscape of our thinking, whether we call it a sanctuary of reading, Proust always had something amazing to say about everything. He saw the heart of reading as the place where we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own.

I thought that was pretty good,

bobb