Brains Adapting to a Different Kind of Reading Style

[Barty]

Ask yourself how much time you spend on MR alone, and whether it is not time that would be better spent reading . And how much of the time spent here is to avoid reading rather than further it?

Now, add email, SMS, social media, news, etc etc etc.

I admit my attention span has been shot by the internet. My iPad calls to me like the sirens.

The novelist Gary Shteyngart says he has a really hard time concentrating on his reading without taking himself out of wireless/wifi range. And he's a professional whose job partly is to read books and review them!

[bevdeforges]

Those who are interested in this issue really should read a book called Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf. The subtitle is: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Reading does actually physically change the brain structure - and it can differ, based on whether you're reading in English or in Chinese or Korean. (Oddly enough, the book is not available as an e-book. I wound up buying the p-book simply because the premise fascinates me.)

It doesn't surprise me that e-reading vs. p-reading or just reading from a back-lit source might require different brain synapses and connections to develop. There's also the matter of the glorification of "multi-tasking" - where constant distraction from the task at hand is considered the ability to handle multiple tasks.

It's certainly true that online reading is a different skill than settling in for a focused reading of a novel or other "intense" book experience. And I suspect that the younger generations, raised on doing everything online in an "interactive" environment may not develop the skills required to read and digest a dense novel or non-fiction work. That will be a loss for civilization (IMO anyhow).

[DiapDealer]

The thought occurred to me that friends have always asked me; "How can you just sit there and read books? Doesn't it get boring?" This was long before the internet came to homes/businesses.

I don't doubt that the internet has had an effect. But I think there's always been a divide between those that read and those who are too "busy" to do so. Sometimes people cross to the other side of that divide. *shrug*

[Katsunami]

Originally Posted by DiapDealer

The thought occurred to me that friends have always asked me; "How can you just sit there and read books? Doesn't it get boring?" This was long before the internet came to homes/businesses.

It just shows that those people don't see reading books as an activity worth doing on its own. For those people, reading is something you do to fill up time, or if given no other choice.

It's even worse with music.

In the past, I've had people ask me what I did in the evening, and if I said "I listen to music", the followup invariably was: "Yes, we all do, but what are you *doing*?"

For these people, music is just constant background noise.

I've always found it strange why people find it quite normal to say "playing a video game" or "watching a movie" if asked what they are doing, while "reading a book" and "listening to music" are often not considered activities of the same kind.

[ApK]

Originally Posted by Barty

Ask yourself how much time you spend on MR alone, and whether it is not time that would be better spent reading . And how much of the time spent here is to avoid reading rather than further it?

When I'm on MR, I AM reading.* And writing. What else could you be doing, tasting it?

The only difference as I see it is attention span. I can do other things between the stuff I read here and still enjoy it and get something out of it. If I had to divide my attention while reading a book or a long-ish story, I could neither enjoy it, nor learn from it.

ApK

*By the way, I don't mean "reading" in only the literal sense, suggesting that all visual scanning of text on a display is "reading" in the same sense of an activity. I mean that on forums like MR, where posts often tend to have some depth, structure and something to say, it is indeed reading in the same sense as reading a newspaper, or a collection of very short essays.
I don't consider consuming most tweets, texts or some of the less literate tech forums to be "reading" int he same sense. That's more, eh, what can I call it to differentiate, 'visually decoding text-based symbols.'

[Prestidigitweeze]

I consider MR to be a place where people converse textually, which means that our interplay is often a hybrid between writing and speaking. But (possibly because of the number of older people, e-book creators and aspiring writers here) conversation sometimes leads to depths of recollection that can be profound if only for the post writer who is actively conjuring their past. I often think of a line by Alice Bradley Sheldon (a/k/a James Tiptree) that once explained to my child self the slow-building conversation of older people: "Every word and cue wakes a thousand references."

For many users, forum-speak is a (circular) necklace beaded with cliches. This is understandable, since the aim is for us to participate modestly in a hobby, not to dazzle one another constantly with our lightning rods of inspiration (innuendo intended -- showing off is a tedious rooster tough-off), which means that the mind and imagination tend not to be exercised on the level provided by a decently written novel. Being here is worthwhile, but it can't replace the imaginative exercise of being totally submerged in a world of narrative, thought and sensory-image-triggering language.

It's simply a question of the level of exercise. At their best, novels can be an intense and sustained imaginative workout, whereas even inspired conversation is like a short walk with multiple interruptions.

As for gaming and the validity of discussing it here:

I became interested in it as a direct result of reading Julio Cortazar's Hopscotch as a kid, then talking to hypertext novelist Michael Joyce at a symposium at Brown University in the early nineties. The first web page I ever created (in 1995, I think) was a hypertext story called "Matterland." Creating it made me especially sensitive to other forms of hypertext narrative, which meant that, just after writing the story, a visit to a friend with a Playstation gave me the sense we were on the verge of refining an immersive new art form. I don't see games and literature as strata of high and low culture so much as art forms with differences and similarities. As specific sensory stimuli become easier to recreate artificially, we head toward a first-person art form in which (in the most obvious structural applications) we are the protagonist and our interactions with the environment determine the narrative. Somewhere between the rail-shooter and the sandbox lies a completely different sense of evolving story than we've had before. And while games, like films, are easiest to create with a massive budget, it's going to become increasingly easy (as with film) to do sophisticated work at home. Canada has the right idea in the sense that their universities and government support academic, composer and artist programmers who wish to create experimental and metanarrative games. Many people think that multiple-choice novel-like games are played out, but I suspect that that's largely because the blockbuster franchise has done to popular gaming what Spielberg and Lucas did to film: Made audiences temporarily intolerant of eccentricities and lower budgets. Truthfully, the evolution of stochastic multimedia narratives is ongoing. Even a Grand Theft Auto game recreates the geographical space of an entire city in which to have apparently indeterminate experiences. In the near future, even the apartment dweller who claims to hate games will take refuge in multimedia vacations, in which a place like Nice or Wellington is lavishly recreated for the bedroom tourist. Now imagine that same re/creation of a world in terms of richly imagined post-dystopian novel. Games like Fallout 3 (and Portal, obviously) have touched on that already -- as has Rule of Rose.