Twitter brain...and how to overcome it.
Cognitive neuroscientist, Maryanne Wolf is concerned the way we read digital information is affecting how our brain deals with the more in depth processing of the printed word, changing circuitry in the brain that's been developed over several millenia.
The brain is the innocent bystander in this new world. It just reflects how we live.
"The brain is plastic its whole life span," Wolf said. "The brain is constantly adapting."
Wolf, one of the world's foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the internet and hundreds of emails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
"I'm not kidding: I couldn't do it," she said. "It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn't force myself to slow down so that I wasn't skimming, picking out key words, organising my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself."
This article in the SMH gives an interesting, and disturbing, observation of the effects of digital reading and its possible consequences. The answer appears to become "bi-literate". In supporting readers of the digital age, libraries are well placed by providing children's storytime programs and printed books along with ebooks and other e-learning resources and helping to avoid "twitter-brain".
Ruth
The brain is the innocent bystander in this new world. It just reflects how we live.
"The brain is plastic its whole life span," Wolf said. "The brain is constantly adapting."
Wolf, one of the world's foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too. After a day of scrolling through the internet and hundreds of emails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game.
"I'm not kidding: I couldn't do it," she said. "It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn't force myself to slow down so that I wasn't skimming, picking out key words, organising my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself."
This article in the SMH gives an interesting, and disturbing, observation of the effects of digital reading and its possible consequences. The answer appears to become "bi-literate". In supporting readers of the digital age, libraries are well placed by providing children's storytime programs and printed books along with ebooks and other e-learning resources and helping to avoid "twitter-brain".
Ruth
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