human beings were never born to read.3 The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it. The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain’s repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply and well changed the very structure of that circuit’s connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought. (Location 48)
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species. (Location 54)
It is more difficult still with children, whose attention is continuously distracted and flooded by stimuli that will never be consolidated in their reservoirs of knowledge. This means that the very basis of their capacity to draw analogies and inferences when they read will be less and less developed. Young reading brains are evolving without a ripple of concern by most people, even though more and more of our youths are not reading other than what is required and often not even that: “tl; dr” (too long; didn’t read). (Location 60)
In the seven years it had taken me to describe how the brain had learned to read over its close to six-thousand-year history, our entire literacy-based culture had begun its transformation into a very different, digitally based culture. (Location 118)
There was almost no research being conducted then on the formation of a digital reading brain. There were no significant studies about what was happening in the brains of children (or adults) as they learned to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium six to seven hours a day (a figure that has since almost doubled for many of our youth). I knew how reading changes the brain and how the brain’s plasticity enables it to be shaped by external factors such as a particular writing system (e.g., English versus Chinese). Unlike scholars in the past such as Walter Ong8 and Marshall McLuhan, I never focused on the influences of the medium (e.g., book versus screen) upon this malleable circuit’s structure. By the end of writing Proust and the Squid, however, I changed. I became consumed with how the circuitry of the reading brain would be altered by the unique characteristics of the digital medium, particularly in the young. (Location 126)
The unnatural, cultural origin of literacy—the first deceptively simple fact about reading—means that young readers do not have a genetically based program for developing such circuits. (Location 134)
No existe un plan de desarrollo innato de la capacidad pra leer
Will new readers develop the more time-demanding cognitive processes nurtured by print-based mediums as they absorb and acquire new cognitive capacities emphasized by digital media? For example, will the combination of reading on digital formats and daily immersion in a variety of digital experiences—from social media to virtual games—impede the formation of the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that are all part of deep reading? Will the mix of continuously stimulating distractions of children’s attention and immediate access to multiple sources of information give young readers less incentive either to build their own storehouses of knowledge or to think critically for themselves? (Location 142)
The connections between how and what we read and what is written are critically important to today’s society. In a milieu that continuously confronts us with a glut of information, the great temptation for many is to retreat to familiar silos of easily digested, less dense, less intellectually demanding information. The illusion of being informed by a daily deluge of eye-byte-sized information can trump the critical analysis of our complex realities. (Location 193)
I ask you to think about who the true “good readers” are in our changing epoch and to reflect for yourself on the immeasurably important role they play in a democratic society—never more so than now. Within these pages the meanings of good reader have little to do with how well anyone decodes words; they have everything to do with being faithful to what Proust once described as the heart of the reading act, going beyond the wisdom of the author to discover one’s own. (Location 210)
There are no shortcuts for becoming a good reader, but there are lives that propel and sustain it. Aristotle wrote that the good society16 has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation. So, too, the good reader. (Location 214)
Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the artist in society to that of the canary in the mines: both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us. (Location 226)
reading is neither natural nor innate; rather, it is an unnatural cultural invention that has been scarcely six thousand years in existence. On any “evolutionary clock,” reading’s history occupies little more than the proverbial tick before midnight, yet this set of skills is so important in its capacity to change our brains that it is accelerating our species’ development, for better and sometimes for worse. (Location 265)
This ability to form newly recycled circuits permits us to learn all manner of genetically unplanned-for activities—from making the first wheel, to learning the alphabet, to surfing the net while listening to Coldplay and sending tweets. None of these activities is hardwired or has genes specifically dedicated to its development; they are cultural inventions that involve cortical takeovers. (Location 280)
a propósito de los cognitive gadgets.
In contrast to reading, oral language is one of our more basic human functions. As such, it possesses dedicated genes that unfold with minimal assistance to produce our capacities to speak and understand and think with words. In language, nature is nurtured by need in a fairly universal sequence around the world. This is why a young child, placed in any typical language environment, will learn to speak that language virtually without instruction. That is a wondrous thing. (Location 284)
plasticity also underlies why the reading-brain circuit is inherently malleable (read changeable) and influenced by key environmental factors: specifically, what it reads (both the particular writing system and the content), how it reads (the particular medium, such as print or screen, and its effects on the way we read), and how it is formed (methods of instruction). The crux of the matter is that the plasticity of our brain permits us to form both ever more sophisticated and expanded circuits and also ever less sophisticated circuits, depending on environmental factors. (Location 303)
for reading to occur, there must be sonic-speed automaticity for neuronal networks at a local level (i.e., within structural regions like the visual cortex), which, in turn, allows for equally rapid connections across entire structural expanses of the brain (e.g., connecting visual regions to language regions). Thus, whenever we name even a single letter, we are activating entire networks of specific neuronal groups in the visual cortex, which correspond to entire networks of equally specific language-based cell groups, which correspond to networks of specific articulatory-motor cell groups—all with millisecond precision. Multiply this scenario a hundredfold when the task is to depict what you are doing when reading this very letter with complete (or even incomplete) attention and comprehension of the meanings involved. (Location 314)
Anyone who still believes the archaic canard that we use only a tiny portion of our brains hasn’t yet become aware of what we do when we read. (Location 323)
The brain’s attentional systems are the equivalent of biological spotlights12: unless the lights are turned on, nothing else can happen. But note that there are different kinds of spotlights. This is because the brain needs to be able to allocate different forms of attention to each of the many steps or processes involved in reading. (Location 365)
In retinotopic organization, highly differentiated neurons in the retina trigger particular corresponding neurons in the visual areas. Not unlike having their own GPS system, the cyclists’ rapid-fire ability to locate the right neurons facilitates their extremely precise and swift transfer of information. In the case of letters, the retinal troupes have to learn to make these connections through multiple exposures in a long developmental process. (Location 414)
This learning is facilitated by the brain’s ability to make representations (think re-presentations) of patterns like letters. The visual cortex of an expert reader is chock-full of representations of letters, as well as common letter patterns and word parts (such as the morphemes that make up the roots, prefixes, and suffixes of our words) and even many well-known words. It is hard to imagine at first, but these representations possess a physical reality in our neuronal networks. Even if we just imagine a letter without seeing it,16 dedicated neuronal groups in the visual cortex corresponding to the representation of that letter will fire away, as if we actually see the letter. (Location 418)
Analogía del desarrollo de musculatura. Importancia del esfuerzo asociado a la lectura en el desarrollo de los circuitos que sustentan la representación y en la capacidad general de “modelar” y manipular modelos en la memoria de trabajo.
What is fascinating to think about is that our present retinotopic organization, which has been recycled in each new reader to include letters and words, would not be, and indeed is not, the same in the cortex of our past ancestors or in any nonliterate person today. Most of the neuronal working groups we now use for letters and words would be largely dedicated in nonliterate individuals to visually similar but functionally different tasks, such as the identification of objects or faces. This is a prime example of how, when the brain learns to read, it repurposes some networks originally used to identify the small features within objects and faces to recognize the similarly small features in letters and words. (Location 428)
reciclaje neuronal
There is something akin to a collective intake of breath from a previously unknown sector in the adjacent Motor ring. There, a lively set of exotically costumed mimes appears at the ready, poised to articulate the word or, far more mysteriously, physically act it out.21 Without obviously moving the close-by neurons controlling the muscles of the lips, larynx, and tongue, they are preparing to simulate moving the muscles of legs and hands, depending on whether the meaning of the word is an action verb or more abstract: “tracks an animal, tracks a crime, tracks data trends, tracks a hurricane.” (Location 458)
la corporeización de la cognición
Whether commands come from this figure or from the prefrontal control box or both is unclear, but the lights on the ring of Cognition now dim, and the wraithlike figure of Anna fades from our view and consciousness. There was not enough information to stay with Anna’s image, even if we are left with an ever-so-slight frisson of vestigial sadness and regret. We realize in this instant that there is always something that remains within us from all previous encounters with this seemingly ordinary word, tracks, and indeed with many words. Just as the cognitive scientist David Swinney25 underscored years ago, our words contain and momentarily activate whole repositories of associated meanings, memories, and feelings, even when the exact meaning in a given context is specified. (Location 489)
Respaldo desde las neurociencias cognitivas a la noción de redes significantes y resonancias inconscientes.
For example, after you encountered the word tracks in this context, you would see in the ERPs what is called an N400 response3 in several language-based regions. The brain-wave activity at around 400 milliseconds in these areas gives an electrophysiological signal of your brain’s surprise. These regions have registered something anomalous and unanticipated—in this case, a meaning that was not initially predicted about the word tracks, particularly after all the different meanings of tracks were just primed or activated in you during the last letter. Sentences in which our initial predictions of the meaning of a word are not confirmed require a cerebrally pregnant pause, especially if, as in this haunting sentence, we are to understand the poignant inferences the last words quietly direct us toward. (Location 542)
correlato neurofisiológico del cerebro predictivo y la actualización de priors.
We who are expert readers process and connect our lower-level perceptual information (i.e., the first rings of the reading circuit) at near-breakneck speeds. Only such speeds can enable us to allocate attention to the higher-level deep-reading processes, which in turn constantly feed their conclusions back and forth with the lower-level processes, thus better preparing them for the next words they encounter. (Location 555)
sobre las capacidades de lectura profunda.
The cognitive beauty of these interactive exchanges is that they accelerate everything from perception to comprehension. They accelerate perception by narrowing the possibilities of what we will read next to a set of words that correspond to what Gina Kuperberg calls “proactive”5 predictions. It’s what every smartphone is now doing as you type your words, if occasionally with wild (and sometimes embarrassing) misses. These predictions in turn stem from various sources, including our working memory of what we have just read and our longer-term memory of stored background knowledge. Together, these interactions among perception, language, and deep-reading processes accelerate our understanding because they allow us to read a sentence of twenty words as a sum of predicted thoughts far more quickly than the sum of information provided by twenty individually read words. (Location 558)
It takes years for deep-reading processes to be formed, and as a society we need to be sure that we are vigilant about their development in our young from a very early age. It takes daily vigilance by us, the expert readers of our society, to choose to expend the extra milliseconds needed to maintain deep reading over time. (Location 570)
Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of our attention? (Location 592)
Take one of the most compelling “short short stories” ever written. It emerged as the result of a wager made to Ernest Hemingway by his unruly group of writing friends. They bet him that he couldn’t write a story in six words. It is hardly surprising that Hemingway took and won the bet. The surprise is that he felt that this story was one of his finest pieces of writing. He was right. With a bare minimum of words, he evoked one of the most powerful visual images, and also some of the same deep-reading processes we might utilize when reading his longer works. Here is his story in six words: For sale: baby shoes, never worn.13 (Location 621)
utilizarlo como imagen para un reel sobre la lectura.
The act of taking on the perspective and feelings of others is one of the most profound, insufficiently heralded contributions of the deep-reading processes. (Location 641)
the act of reading is a special place in which human beings are freed from themselves to pass over to others and, in so doing, learn what it means to be another person with aspirations, doubts, and emotions that they might otherwise never have known. (Location 657)
There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them. (Location 702)
theory of mind refers to an essential human capacity that allows us to perceive, analyze, and interpret the thoughts and feelings of others in our social interactions with them. (Location 768)
In what is surely one of the more intriguingly titled articles in this research, “Your Brain on Jane Austen,”32 the scholar of eighteenth-century literature Natalie Phillips teamed with Stanford neuroscientists to study what happens when we read fiction in different ways: that is, with and without “close attention.” (Think back to the two Collins quotes.) Phillips and her colleagues found that when we read a piece of fiction “closely,” we activate regions of the brain that are aligned to what the characters are both feeling and doing. She and her colleagues were frankly surprised that just by asking their literature graduate students either to read closely or to read for entertainment, different regions of the brain became activated, including multiple areas involved in motion and touch. (Location 778)
The cognitive scientist Keith Oatley,34 who studies the psychology of fiction, has demonstrated a strong relationship between reading fiction and the involvement of the cognitive processes known to underlie both empathy and theory of mind. Oatley and his York University colleague Raymond Mar suggest that the process of taking on another’s consciousness in reading fiction and the nature of fiction’s content—where the great emotions and conflicts of life are regularly played out—not only contribute to our empathy, but represent what the social scientist Frank Hakemulder called our “moral laboratory.”35 In this sense, when we read fiction, the brain actively simulates the consciousness of another person, including those whom we would never otherwise even imagine knowing. It allows us to try on, for a few moments, what it truly means to be another person, with all the similar and sometimes vastly different emotions and struggles that govern others’ lives. The reading circuitry is elaborated by such simulations; so also our daily lives, and so also the lives of those who would lead others. (Location 791)
ejercicio de simulacion es el que estimula los circuitos
Many first-grade readers might be able to decode Hemingway’s six-word story, but they would not have the background knowledge to infer its underlying meaning or to feel any of the emotions you and I experience when reading it. Over the life span, everything we read adds to a reservoir of knowledge that is the basis of our ability to comprehend and to predict whatever we read. (Location 817)
We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips. (Location 833)
In reading research, the cognitive psychologist Keith Stanovich suggested something similar some time ago about the development of word knowledge. In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the “Matthew Effect”41 after a passage in the New Testament. There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. Our young will not know what they do not know. (Location 849)
el efecto acumulativo de la lectura profunda. Desarrollo de la mente coml expansión del universo. Vygotsky.
Without sufficient background knowledge, the rest of the deep-reading processes will be deployed less often, leading to a situation in which many people will never move outside the boundaries of what they already know. For knowledge to evolve, we need to continuously add to our background knowledge. (Location 856)
We need to ensure that human beings do not fall into the trap that Edward Tenner described when he said, “It would be a shame if brilliant technology43 were to end up threatening the kind of intellect that produced it.” (Location 863)
In one of the most famous statements about scientific breakthroughs, Louis Pasteur wrote, “Chance comes only to the prepared mind.”45 That elegant statement could just as easily describe the role of background knowledge in the deep-reading brain. (Location 869)