Reading Rewired Brains; Print Rewired Civilizations
I've been interested in the co-evolution of technology, media, and mind for a while. My 1968 Reed College thesis was on the emerging field of neurofeedback as both a means of observing consciousness and a tool for altering/extending it. Tools for Thought (1985) began my investigation of digital media as mind amplifiers, and my 2012 ebook, Mind Amplifier zoomed out to look at the continuum/evolution of mind-altering and civilization-altering effects of speech, writing, print, and digital media. When I was writing Net Smart -- about social media literacies -- I focused on reading as a pivotal example of an information tool and practice that literally alters our brains:
When I looked for scientific means of sorting through the theorizing and philosophizing about whether the Internet is making us stupid or not, I was thrilled to discover Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development at Tufts University. Wolf, an expert on the neural, cognitive, and cultural components of reading, confronts the issue of how media such as books or computer networks affect the brain. In Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Wolf wrote: “We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history; the ability to record history is one of its consequences. Our ancestors’ invention could come about only because of the human brain’s extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain’s ability to be shaped by experience. This plasticity at the heart of the brain’s design forms the basis for much of who we are, and we might become.”[i] Human thinking processes are neither “wired” nor “rewired,” although it is convenient to think of them in that way; although the probability that a specific set of brain cells will fire in synchronization does resemble fixed circuitry, the brain works in a more dynamic way than the wiring metaphor implies. Wolf emphasizes that groups of neurons create new connections and strengthen pathways between them in specific networks whenever a person acquires a new skill. “Thanks to this design,” Wolf noted, “we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it.”[ii]. This is the “neural plasticity” feared by Carr.
Humans are born biologically equipped to recognize visual patterns and to extract meaning from those patterns, but meshing language, vision, and attention to transmit knowledge was invented — reading is a mind technology. The visual component of reading appears to make use of deeply embedded perceptual mechanisms that probably evolved in order to track predators and prey by deciphering their footprints.[iii]Each of the innate capacities recruited by the brain for use in the reading process evolved in response to some survival requirement. Wolf put it this way: “it would seem more than likely that the reading brain exploited older neuronal pathways originally designed not only for vision but for connecting vision to conceptual and linguistic functions: for example, connecting the quick recognition of a shape with a rapid inference that this footprint can signal danger; connecting a recognized tool, predator, or enemy with the retrieval of a word. When confronted, therefore, with the task of inventing functions like literacy and numeracy, our brain had at its disposal three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns of information; and the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these areas automatically. In one way or another these three principles of brain organization a foundation for all of readings evolution, developments, and failure.”[iv]
Reading requires these separate perceptual and cognitive functions to work in a highly coordinated manner: the visual recognition of a letterform, the sequencing of letterforms, and recognition of sequences as representations of words, all must synchronize in ways that our brains did not acquire through biological evolution. As Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker put it, “children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.”[v]). By training humans to read, those naturally not-coordinated processes can be harnessed to create a valuable new meta-process — the ability to encode knowledge in written marks, transmit those marks across time and space, and to for any other trained person a thousand miles away or a thousand years in the future to decode that knowledge. The display of letterforms on a blackboard, the rote recitation of the alphabet by students — tools that go back to the dawn of civilization — are brain-changing methods for creating entirely new mental mechanisms by connecting existing ones in a new way. Another reading expert, Stanislas Dehaene, calls this adoption of previously-evolved brain mechanisms to serve new tasks “neuronal recycling.”[vi]Multiple levels of neural and cultural plasticity make the progressive bootstrapping power of literacy possible: Training humans to read induces permanent changes in the way brain networks function; pre-existing brain functions can be coordinated to perform the new tasks such as reading, writing, and arithmetic; and literacy-augmented populations can invent better alphabets, printing presses, wireless telegraphs. Understanding the broader dynamics surrounding the encounter of your brain and the Web is essential meta-knowledge that will lend power to your efforts to gain greater control over mediated attention.
[i] Wolf, Proust and the Squid.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Dehaene, Reading.
[iv] Wolf, Proust and the Squid.
[v] Steven Pinker, “Foreword” in D. McGuinness, Why Our Children Can’t Read — and What We Can Do About It: A Scientific Revolution in Reading, (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster, 1997)
[vi] Dehaene, Reading.
The swift and vast expansion of literacy triggered by the printing press has been attributed to the Protestant Reformation, in which individuals were encouraged to read the Bible for themselves, unmediated by the church. Elizabeth Eisenstein's The Printing Press as An Agent of Change detailed how the revolution that Luther detonated, and the revolution initiated by Gutenberg met in a historical symbiosis. Eisenstein asserted that the mode of dissemination, standardization, and preservation of knowledge enabled by the printing press changed the European mentality.
More recently, I have been interested in cultural evolution, in particular the cultural evolution of cooperation. Joe Henrich, author of an important book about human cooperation, The Secret of Our Success, recently pointed more specifically at the way print has altered the way our brains operate in literate societies. In his article, "Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain," Henrich begins to tease out the neuro-specifics of literacy:
The story of literacy, Luther, and your left ventral occipital temporal region is but one example in a much larger scientific mosaic that is just now coalescing. Our minds, brains, and indeed our biology are, in myriad ways, substantially shaped by the social norms, values, institutions, beliefs, and languages bequeathed to us from prior generations. By setting the incentives and defining the constraints, our culturally-constructed world shape how we think, feel and perceive—they tinker with and calibrate the machinery of our minds.
Digital media and worldwide networks constitute a metamedium that includes the qualities of print, speech, music, video, and adds qualities that didn't exist before (e.g., search, hyperlinking). Our individual brains and our societies are undergoing another change, one that we have only begun to examine and understand. When thinking about how we ought to treat emerging literacies, I liked Maryann Wolf's take:
In the transmission of knowledge the children and teachers of the future should not be faced with a choice between books and screens, between newspapers and capsuled versions of the news on the Internet, or between print and other media. Our transition generation has an opportunity, if we seize it, to pause and use our most reflective capacities, to use everything at our disposal to prepare for the formation of what will come next. The analytical, inferential, perspective-taking reading brain with all its capacity for human consciousness, and the nimble, multifunctional, multimodal, information-integrative capacities of a digital mind-set do not need to inhabit exclusive realms. Many of our children learn to code-switch between two or more oral languages, and we can teach them also to switch between different presentations of written language and different modes of analysis. Perhaps, like the memorable image captured in 600 BCE of a Sumerian scribe patiently transcribing cuneiform beside an Akkadian scribe, we will be able to preserve the capacities of two systems and appreciate why both are precious.
Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain[i]
[i] Maryanne Wolf, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, (New York, NY: HarperCollins, 2007), 228.