Next time you board a train, watch the other passengers. For infants and toddlers, the tablet has become the device that keeps them quiet. Children just starting school follow stories on their phones, while older ones ignore books and bend over handheld games. The adults glide through tablets or race across streams of messages and headlines. What almost none of them realise is that a quiet but profound shift binds everyone in that carriage together: the network of brain cells on which reading depends is being reshaped, quickly and unnoticed, and the consequences reach from the youngest child who cannot yet read to the most experienced adult.
Neuroscience tells us that when human beings first became literate, more than six thousand years ago, their brains had to build an entirely new circuit for it. What began as a rudimentary system for registering simple facts, how many goats stood in a herd, became the intricate reading brain we carry today. In my own work I have traced how this reading brain supports several capacities we value most: the knowledge we make our own, the ability to reason by analogy and draw inferences, the taking on of another's viewpoint and the empathy that follows, and the careful analysis from which fresh insight springs. Yet studies now emerging worldwide warn that these deep reading capacities could be endangered as reading migrates onto digital devices.
None of this reduces to a tidy contest between print and screens, or to a verdict for or against new technology. The media sociologist Halvard Reinholt has argued that a society's mistake lies not in innovating but in overlooking whatever gets disrupted or worn away in the process. Poised at the turning point between a print culture and a digital one, we need to look squarely at what is fading in the practised reader's circuitry, at the capacities our children and older students are failing to build, and at what might be done in response.
Research makes clear that, unlike sight or speech, the capacity to read is not handed to us by our genes; it takes shape only through experience. Once it forms, it moulds itself to whatever that experience demands, to the writing system in use and to whichever medium carries the words. Should the prevailing medium reward speed, multitasking and the handling of information in bulk, as digital technology does, the reading circuit will bend that way. The consequence, as the developmental psychologist Ana Petrescu has observed, is that the slower, more demanding work of deep reading is granted steadily less time and attention.
A growing body of testimony from teachers and from psychology and humanities scholars points the same way. The literature professor Desmond Ackroyd, who teaches undergraduates, recounts how many of them now steer clear of the classic nineteenth- and twentieth-century novels, preferring something less taxing, because they have lost the patience that long, dense and challenging texts require. What ought to trouble us, though, is less this cognitive impatience itself than what may lie beneath it: the risk that huge numbers of students can no longer read critically enough to follow the intricate reasoning and argument that harder texts contain.
Several studies suggest that time on screens may be producing worrying knock-on effects on how well older secondary and university students understand what they read. Working in Tampere, Finland, the psychologist Elspeth Rowan and her team compared how secondary students grasped identical material in different formats. They chose a short story with a plot that appeals to almost any young reader and questioned the participants about it; one half had read it on a tablet, the other on printed paper. The students who read the printed version came out ahead of their screen-reading counterparts in comprehension, and the gap was widest when it came to putting the story's events back into their proper order.
In a sequence of studies, the information scientist Rahul Menon of Westlake State University has found that skimming has become the new normal, a matter of hunting for individual words and glancing through the page. A common habit now is to take in the opening line and then pick out scattered words across everything that follows. Reading that skims this way steals time from the deeper processes, leaving us no room to take in complexity, to sense what another person feels, to register beauty, or to form ideas of our own.
That critical thought, empathy and the other deep reading processes might become the accidental casualties of our digital age is, again, not a plain either/or question of print against screen. It concerns how all of us have taken to reading across a range of media, and how this alters not merely what we read but the very reasons we read at all. Nor is it the young alone who are affected: the quiet wearing-away of critical thought and empathy reaches every one of us to the same degree. It weakens our ability to navigate the ceaseless barrage of information, and pushes us toward the most comfortable reserves of unexamined material, which demand no scrutiny and get none, leaving us open to falsehoods and to ideas with no basis in reason.
Neuroscience has a long-standing maxim that holds at any age: use it or lose it. Applied to critical thinking within the reading brain, it is an encouraging idea, precisely because it leaves the matter up to us. The tale of the reading brain's transformation is far from over. Between them, science and technology give us the means to spot the shifts in how we read, and to put them right, before they harden into permanence. Provided we grasp exactly what stands to be lost, alongside the new powers the digital world has granted us, there is quite as much cause for optimism as for worry.
