Deep reading: “Our species’ bridge to insight”
“Where is the knowledge in our information? Where is the wisdom in our knowledge?”
This is how American educator and author Maryanne Wolf renders these questions which poet T.S. Eliot presciently asked in his play about religion in the 20th century, “The Rock”, written nearly 90 years ago. Director of UCLA’s Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice, she voices them in an essay, posted last year by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s Religion & Ethics arm, which wonders, “How do we cultivate deep reading processes in a digital age?”.
Nowadays, educators and neuroscientists alike “ask similar questions,” she explains: “Will different mediums advantage or disadvantage our abilities to acquire information, distinguish what is true, immerse ourselves in the perspectives of others, and turn information into knowledge, the precursor of wisdom?” All such desirable outcomes, such essential aftereffects, require what Wolf calls “deep reading”: “Deep reading is our species’ bridge to insight and novel thought.”
Is this even possible in what she describes as “our new reality, when many people are tethered to multiple screens at any given moment”? After all—and here she quotes from a study reported in the journal JAMA Pediatrics—“When watching a screen…[t]he brain becomes ‘overwhelmed,’ and is unable to leave adequate resources for itself to mature in cognitive skills….”
Then, after a 49-word sentence all about “the brain’s circuity” and “analytical reasoning,” Wolf writes: “Admit it: many of you skimmed the last dense sentence…. You sought the information quickly, without expending extra time on reflecting further. If so, you missed two opportunities—to examine the basis for the statements, and to propel your own thoughts. That’s because you skimmed, browsed, or word-spotted…. ‘To skim to inform’ is the new norm for reading.” Such a shame! Heed is “increasingly at risk in a culture and on a medium in which constant distraction bifurcates our attention.”
Recipient of multiple research and teaching honours, Wolf, whose most recent book is entitled Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, points out that “skimming for information, instead of reading at deeper levels…has long-ranging effects on individuals’ ability to think critically, and to take on the perspective of others.” In a 2020 podcast for the Simbi Foundation—it’s a NPO that strives to enhance access to education for learners in remote and refugee communities—she worries that “skimming also promotes a reliance on silos of familiar information, and thus hampers the development of taking on other perspectives.” And that stymies empathy.
To hear her tell it, “a skim…literally misses beauty, misses the depths of language and meaning, misses complexity, misses our own ability to be critically analytic, misses our ability to leave our little selves, our egocentric spheres….”
So it is that she, in that ABC posting, espouses deep reading processes, which “include connecting background knowledge to new information, making analogies, drawing inferences, examining truth, value, passing over into the perspectives of others (expanding empathy and knowledge), and integrating everything into critical analysis.” Deploy such “decoding skills and purposeful attention,” and “our thoughts’ furthest reaches” can be attained.
“By contrast, when we skim, we literally, physiologically, don’t have time to think. […] The difference between skimming and reading with all our intelligence is the difference between fully activated reading brains and their short-circuited, screen-dulled versions.” Wolf references a study in which over “80% of college educators see a ‘shallowing’ effect by screens on their students’ reading comprehension. […] [S]creens are associated with distraction, which leads to…continuous partial attention.”
She urges: “Check yourself. Do you often read the first line of a page, and zigzag to the bottom? […] What is lost lies between the lines: details in plot, the beauty of the author’s language, immersion into others’ perspectives. The consequences of these losses cascade from decreasing empathy and critical analysis to susceptibility to fake news, demagoguery, and their corrosive influence on a democratic society.” She worries that this “new reality” will “exacerbate threats to full literacy.”
The solution? “The medium of print, [which] advantages slower, more attention- and time-requiring processes. […] Let us make books anew”—this is Wolf’s concluding sentence—”the places where we all can leave our selves behind, and explore knowledge, people, places, ideas beyond our imagination, which, in the process, transforms, challenges, and expands us, as individuals and as a species.”
Wolf is right back at it in a podcast that The Conversation issued last March 30: “Too many digital distractions are eroding our ability to read deeply, and here’s how we can become aware of what’s happening”. [Now a dozen years old, The Conversation is, according to Wikipedia, a worldwide “network of not-for-profit media outlets that publishes news stories and research reports online, with accompanying expert opinion and analysis.” “Academic rigour, journalistic flair,” is its motto.]
It pictures this podcast, which features Wolf and two other scholars, as explaining how and why the oh-so-many demands for our attention are affecting us, and what we can do about it. “We are confronted with, and have to process incredible amounts of information daily,” which has “our brains…often functioning in overdrive….” What’s more, interaction with all this clutter is “removing from us our ability to be present.” Wolf, it mentions, “believes that reading is important, because it contributes to a person’s potential, and enhances the ability to learn, think, and be discerning.”
But she herself adds that it is “deep reading”—there’s that phrase, again—“that expand[s] the reading brain….” And, “with everything we read and learn” over time, “we begin to be human beings who have the ability to take their background knowledge, [and] use [it] with logical thinking, to infer what is the truth—or the lack of truth—in what they are reading.”
It’s like this, she declares: “We have all changed. We don’t even realize it. But there’s a patience that’s needed inside ourselves to give attention to inference, empathy, critical analysis. It takes effort. And we’re so accustomed to going so fast that the immersive-ness is difficult.”
But so worth the effort. In her Simbi Foundation podcast, Wolf again boosts “the special quality” that deep reading “can occasionally give us”. It provides the springboard from which “we can actually propel ourselves to think for ourselves in a new way. It’s the place we can go…where we are no longer dependent or content with others’ thoughts. We are challenged by perspectives of others….
“And that is what makes [each of] us able to be…a better member of society, who will say, ‘Wait, please. We can’t just accept something just because it’s in our familiar silo. We have to do better. We have to think better.” In that talk, she aches for “literacy in the fullest sense, and by that I mean a proficient, deep-reading brain. I want that for…our world.”
Ken Fredrick
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In the midst of busyness, “become an island of stillness”
There, on the shelves in the SSUC Library, wedged between books by Naim Stifan Ateek and Maude Barlow, is The Confessions of Saint Augustine. Written between 397 and 400 AD, and widely seen as the first Western autobiography, it chronicles Augustine’s sinful youth and his conversion to Christianity. According to Wikipedia, it’s been judged “a significant theological work”.
In it, Augustine tells us how overwhelmed he was by the limits of human knowledge, and that “he was increasingly skeptical that anyone could come to know the truth about how to live,” which is how Zena Hitz puts it in her 2023 book, The Liberating Arts: Why We Need Liberal Arts Education.
Augustine “describes his internal dialogue at the time: ‘…There is no time for reading. Where should we look for the books that we need? Where and when can we obtain them? From whom can we borrow them?’
“[H]ere is one of his great human moments,” Hitz writes. “He wants to know how to live,” but he “doesn’t have time” to puzzle that out—“he’s too busy. […] He doesn’t have time to read. Besides, he doesn’t have time to get the books. Too bad for Augustine—he can’t figure out the best way to live. He’s too busy.”
But his plight is not his alone: in his Confessions, he tells how busy is his mentor, Ambrose. But the bishop of Milan has found a solution: “[I]n the brief moments in which he does not have an appointment”—Hitz, again—Ambrose “reads silently. He does not steal away to a quiet place. Ambrose just sits and reads in the midst of his busyness….”
This churchman “’restored…his mind by reading,’” Augustine reports. “’When he was reading, his eyes ran over the page, and his heart perceived the sense, but his voice and tongue were silent.’” And in such albeit brief interludes, the bishop, Augustine supposed, was able to refresh himself and his mind, “f’ree from the hubbub of other people’s troubles.’”
And those about him learned not to disturb him: “’Very often when we were there, we saw him silently reading, and never otherwise,’” Augustine recounts in his Confessions. “‘After sitting for a long time in silence—for who would dare to burden him in such intent concentration?—we used to go away.’”
So, this is how Ambrose chose “to use his spare snatches of time—to return within himself,” Hitz explains, “to become an island of stillness.”
