Deep reading, more insights
Deep reading, more insights
Or, how to light up your whole brain
Reading is unnatural. There’s no one part of the human gene or brain responsible for the ability to read. I learned recently on the Ezra Klein Podcast (overview + audio, transcript) that, instead, over time, our brains have evolved to string together a few different systems to make reading possible. On the episode, he interviews Maryanne Wolf a researcher and scholar at U.C.L.A.’s School of Education and Information Studies. Her books “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” and “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” explore the relationship between the process of reading and the neuroscience of the brain. (Link)
People have been reading longer than we’ve been printing books en masse, but the ubiquity of reading, of literacy globally, is more recent. And from early reading to the dawn of the internet our brains adapted to reading books more than anything else, aside from maybe newspapers which for our purposes here aren’t too different.
Wolf researches, in a variety of ways, the impact that reading moving onto screens from book pages has on our reading lives. Suffice it to say, it’s a major difference with a major impact that’s summarized by the apt title to a book she mentions that I must now add to my reading list, The Shallows by Nicholas Carr. By spending our reading lives skimming, scanning and reading headlines and comments on posts we get shallower and shallower missing out on “deep reading.”
What are we really missing out on when we miss out on deep reading? Wolf talks about deep reading along two lines, attention and insight. When reading a book deeply we attend to it for a prolonged period of time. With the next post or video a flick away we train our brains to attend for shorter periods of time. When reading a book deeply we also have the opportunity to experience strokes of insight, of association, of epiphany, of, I’d call it, deep learning. This is less and less likely with the scroll or the clickbait headline scan.
At one point the reading we do is likened to playing slot machines, at another to highly addictive, over engineered foods (fast food + junk food) and also to engineered-to-captivate, kids television, namely, Cocomelon (article mentioned).
Muscles and abilities atrophy. We become addicted to distracted, insightless forms of reading. We begin to live shallower imaginative and intellectual lives. It makes you wonder what minds evolving in this way will look and behave like 100 years from now.
Throughout the podcast, the pair establish that this is the current societal trajectory. At the very end Klein asks what Wolf’s solve is and points out he’s skeptical of it. It involves reading more open-ended, expansive texts in the morning and before bed in the evening. At another point, Wolf shares an experience she puts herself through in which she goes back to a book she once loved. A longer, deeper, more challenging work of written art by Herman Hesse.
She finds when she goes back to this kind of deeper, longer, more challenging reading she can. not. do it. It’s boring, it’s hard to get through, it’s a slog. After ages of telling people they need to read differently she comes face to face with the reality that she also cannot read in the way she encourages others to. She finds that she must deeply slow herself down before she can slog through the book she used to love.
Why slog though? Is it worth it? I say yes. Wolf points to why describing “this one amazing set of researchers who were trying to deal with, what’s the “ah ha” experience? What’s the insight experience we have? And what they found was that the brain was activated everywhere. It would see all these different regions in both hemispheres.” It just plain feels good to for your brain to be activated everywhere.
Maybe now you’re convinced that some slow reading of big books is worth your while. You want to read more deeply and conjure more insights. You’re going to “deeply slow yourself down” and more patiently read that which isn’t so engineered to addict you and your pleasure sensors.
Awesome.
But now what? How?
For me, it’s hard to really cultivate ah ha experiences solo. I am sure there are minds out there that much much prefer to cultivate those kinds of experiences solo. I am sure many others would prefer to sit down and journal and read and then write to foment their ah ha’s. I am not one of them. I choose to never read alone.
My path from the shallows to a deeper, richer reading and learning life is to book a dialogue session to talk about my reading with someone else who’s read the same work. I think of it as the same reading, but more insights.
Insights to light up my whole brain.
Podcast (Coming soon)
Workshops (Coming soon)
Reach out to me just for fun! - tommy@extragrad.com