Reading is unnatural. That is the argument laid out in the BBC World Service video How Reading Changes the Way Your Brain Works, and it is a useful one to keep in mind as you try to focus on this sentence instead of the Minecraft game running in another tab.
The video features UCLA neuroscientist Rebecca Gotlieb, who explains that our brains did not evolve to process text the way they evolved to handle vision and speech. On an evolutionary historical scale, she says, “we haven’t had enough time to develop a dedicated reading brain.” Instead, we jury-rig. We co-opt parts of the brain involved in vision, auditory processing, language, attention, and affect.
That jury-rigging applies to everyone who has ever picked up a book, whether you are reading Sumerian cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, or the latest issue of Open Culture. The brain of a scribe in ancient Sumeria worked the same way as yours does now, except that the literacy rate was closer to one percent, mostly among scribes, priests, and nobles. Today, the global average is around 88 percent and climbing.
The Jury-Rigged Brain
Gotlieb’s point is that reading is a relatively new skill for our species. The brain does not have a pre-existing module for decoding written symbols. It has to borrow from elsewhere. When you read a word, your visual system identifies the shapes, your language centers interpret the sounds, and your attention system holds the thread together across sentences. That is a lot of machinery to repurpose for one activity.
The scale of reading has also changed dramatically. Ancient Sumeria and Egypt had literacy rates around one percent, a number comprising mostly scribes, priests, and nobles. Today, the global average is around 88 percent and rising. The medium has changed too. The shift from papyrus to paper was remarkable at the time, but the more recent shift from paper to electronic screens has already changed the way we think about our world.
Skimming on Screens
Gotlieb offers a warning about the digital transition. “When we read on screens, we tend to skim,” she says, “and when we skim, we’re more susceptible to misinformation.” That observation is not new, but it is worth repeating. The past decade’s troubled political reportage has made the point many times and many ways.
In 2018, Maryanne Wolf, author of Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, argued in the Guardian that the “subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy” apparently caused by technology-encouraged skimming “affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar silos of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and demagoguery.”
Wolf’s concern is that skimming online is a habit, and habits become default settings. When you read a physical book, you tend to engage fully. When you read a web page, you tend to glance. The difference matters. The full engagement of reading a book builds comprehension and empathy. The glancing of a screen builds familiarity with headlines and links.
The Children Are Watching
The stakes get higher when you consider the youngest readers. Wolf’s blunt conclusion, quoted in the video, is: “the more digital, the worse academic.”
The mechanism is straightforward. A young brain that is “constantly being distracted and hyperstimulated” will struggle to move from one stimulus to the next without a desire for ever-quicker intervals between stimuli. The result is a generation of readers who are quick to switch but slow to settle. That settling is the foundation of deep reading.
As parents, teachers, or other visible examples of grown-uphood, Wolf says we can do nothing to counteract that more effectively than to model and enjoy a rich “reading life” for the next generation. We must, in other words, pick up books and not put them down. That may sound easy to a regular Open Culture reader. But ask yourself this: how many times did you click over to something else before getting to the end of this post?
The Wolf Argument
The Wolf argument rests on a few key points:
- Technology encourages skimming, which is faster but shallower.
- Skimming atrophies critical analysis and empathy.
- These losses affect how we navigate information overload.
- They incentivize retreat to familiar silos of unchecked information.
- False information and demagoguery follow.
Each link in that chain is worth holding onto. The first is observable: anyone who has clicked through a newsfeed knows the pull of the next headline. The second is a claim about brain function, not proven here, but it fits the broader picture of what Gotlieb describes as jury-rigged attention. The third is the practical consequence. The fourth is the behavior change. The fifth is the outcome.
The video does not offer a definitive answer to the screen question. It offers a framework. Reading is unnatural, but it is possible. The brain can adapt. The question is how fast it adapts, and whether the adaptation is in our favor.
What the Video Shows
The video brings together neuroscience and education in a digestible format. Gotlieb’s research comes from UCLA, and her argument is straightforward: the brain did not evolve to read. It jury-rigs existing systems to make sense of text. That jury-rigging is universal across all scripts, from Sumerian cuneiform to Chinese characters to the Arabic abjad, each of which has its own influence on its users’ neurological architecture.
The video also traces the history of reading. Ancient Sumeria and Egypt had literacy rates around one percent, a number comprising mostly scribes, priests, and nobles. Today, the global average is around 88 percent and rising. The medium has changed too. The shift from papyrus to paper was remarkable at the time, but the more recent shift from paper to electronic screens has already changed the way we think about our world.
The Verdict
The takeaway is not alarmism. It is awareness. When you reach for your phone, know what you are reaching for. When you open a book, know what you are opening. The brain is plastic. The habits are not.
“the more digital, the worse academic”
That is the verdict, and it is a sobering one. But it is also a call to action. The next generation does not have to repeat the mistakes of the last. They can read better. They can read deeper. They can read more.
The video is a good start. It is worth watching. It is worth sharing. And it is worth remembering the next time you find yourself halfway through an article, wondering why you started it at all.
See the video the story is built around at Openculture.
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