How We Return to the Good Old Days

Our changing brains

In this epistolary book, Wolf, a neuroscientist by training and now the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learnings, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies [2], considers a future where our critical thinking abilities and capacity for empathy and reflection diminish as we become more dependent on digital technology. 

In the first few letters of the book, Wolf argues that our digital environments have affected what and how we read, threatening the process of deep reading. According to Wolf, “deep reading” encompasses the sophisticated processes in our comprehension which allows for higher order thinking such as critical thinking and reflection. However, as we are constantly surrounded by digital devices competing for our attention, our attention span has reduced and we find it increasingly difficult to work through long and complex texts. As our brains grow accustomed to receiving multiple stimuli simultaneously, Wolf argues that we are losing our ability to engage in the deep-reading process.

At this point in the book (barely a third through), I realised that I was proving Wolf’s point. I couldn’t keep up with her long, complex sentences and constantly found myself going back a few pages to digest what she had just written. I was so used to exhausting myself watching cooking videos on YouTube that I found myself constantly thinking about what I could have been doing instead of reading. But what exactly does this mean for my reading processes?

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Wolf argues that the disengagement from the deep reading process affects our critical thinking abilities. Before we had such easy and immediate access to widely shared sources of knowledge like the internet, books provided each of us with unique, internal sources of knowledge. When engaged in the deep reading process, we make connections with our own experiences that lead to unique interpretations of the book. However, with the internet just a few clicks away, Wolf posits that our reliance on such external sources of knowledge has diminished our ability to think critically.

Indeed, I am personally guilty of skipping the arduous process of thinking — more often than I would like to admit — whenever a googleable question pops into my head (“what does the ending of The Handmaid’s Tale mean?”). With digital devices conveniently on hand, I now find it difficult to engage in such higher-level thinking processes, especially on occasions which don’t involve me pouring over an assignment.

Our reduced capacity for critical thinking is not the only consequence of our digital culture. Wolf makes another crucial argument that by not engaging in deep reading processes, our capacity for empathy decreases as well. Reading requires us to understand the world the characters are in, to understand the way they think, how they would behave, and how they think other characters would behave. In this age where social media becomes a platform for (healthy and unhealthy) public debate, this constant practice of empathy is more important than ever. 

Even with critical thinking skills and empathy, we still need a final crucial aspect ⁠to internalise our reading experience — reflection. We need to consolidate and make sense of our newfound knowledge, even if it means unlearning what we have learnt. Reflection allows us to question the assumptions we have, to think for ourselves and to become better subjects in our society.