Campus Review Volume 29 Issue 1 January 2019 | Seite 28

Technology
campusreview.com.au
The death of deep literacy
Is technology changing
our reading brain?
By Rosemary Ross Johnston
L
ast year, instead of driving to work, I started travelling by bus.
No matter what time of day it was, there was one common
denominator: almost every passenger was absorbed in their
mobile phone.
This is an age of miraculous connections and connectedness.
Never before, in the history of the world, have people carried
in their pockets a means of communicating within minutes –
seconds! – with others across countries and oceans.
Yet, despite this ostensible connectedness and the huge
advances in the technology which make it possible, we are
becoming an increasingly fragmented society.
Social commentator Hugh Mackay, in last year’s Gandhi Oration,
described us as “anxious”. He said we had lost our sense of
community, were stressed by rapid change, and were individualistic
and self-absorbed. Indeed, we are what Mackay calls a “me culture”.
“Think of the epidemic of selfies. Think of the primary uses
of social media – not to communicate but to brag. Think of the
growing emphasis on personal entitlement rather than civic
responsibility.”
Research for my latest book, Shifting Horizons: Educating Young
Australians in the 21st Century has highlighted how deep the
problem is and how profoundly it is affecting society, especially
young people.
Yet it seems antithetical – paradoxical almost. How, in this great
age of super connectedness, can we not have a sense of belonging?
And there is another, affiliated problem. Increasing numbers of
scholars across disciplines are warning that we are at risk of losing
some of the communication skills, particularly that of reading, that
helped us become connected in the first place.
Just as the intimacy of connectedness has at least for some
become a force for alienation, so the desire to grab quick
meaning – and abbreviate it in transmission – is becoming a new
norm in reading.
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It is ironic that we seem to be turning into slick readers, skating
over the tops of words, rather than deep readers, diving for their
richness, at a time when researchers from multiple disciplines – not
only in literary studies and education, but in psychology, paediatrics
and neuroscience – are stressing both the testable importance of
reading (and of reading stories), and the positive effects of reading
on the brain.
The brain has a region exclusively dedicated to reading, yet
reading skill only developed about 5500 years ago, which scientists
say is not enough time for evolution to reshape the brain.
A 2016 study from the MIT McGovern Institute for Brain Research
suggests that this brain region has connections to parts of the brain
that are in place before a child learns to read, and that the ‘visual
word form area’ (VWFA, which receives visual input) has pre-existing
connections to regions associated with language processing.
Lead author Zeynep Saygin says it is likely that the region involved
in some kind of visual high-level object recognition is taken over
for word recognition as a child learns to read. (This supports
the importance of picture books – as teachers and parents can
also testify.)
Another study entailing a six-month daily reading program found
that intensive instruction to improve reading skills in young children
causes the brain to physically rewire itself, and increases the
volume of white matter in the language area of the brain.
The rapidly increasing research in neuroscience confirms
earlier studies about the significance of reading stories. It also
shows how this can develop what sports scientists call ‘muscle
memory’ – muscles that physically react not only by doing but just
by visualising or reading about an action.
Gregory Berns, director of Emory University’s Center for
Neuropolicy in the US, found that reading a novel may cause
persisting changes in the resting-state connectivity of the brain and
better brain function. He also found it improved the reader’s ability
for empathy:
“Even though the participants were not actually reading the
novel while they were in the scanner, they retained this heightened
connectivity. We call that a ‘shadow activity’, almost like a
muscle memory…
“We already knew that good stories can put you in someone
else’s shoes in a figurative sense. Now we’re seeing that something
may also be happening biologically.”
Keith Oatley, a cognitive psychologist, has found that reading
produces a vivid simulation of reality that runs in readers’ minds in
much the same way as computer simulations run on computers.
Oatley says the brain does not make much of a distinction
between reading about an experience and living it – the same
neurological regions are stimulated.
Canadian psychologist Raymond Mar, from York University,
found that there was considerable overlap in the brain networks
used to understand stories and the networks used to navigate
interactions with other individuals — in particular, interactions
where we are trying to determine the thoughts and feelings
of others.
Oatley and Mar have found that people who frequently read
fiction appear better able to understand other people, empathise
with them and see the world from their perspective.
A study by Princeton University goes further. Researcher
Uri Hasson says that when stories are told, the brains of teller and
listener can actually synchronise.