Re: The Future of Reading
Posted by
Victoria Hughes on
Sep 09, 2010; 1:33pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/The-Future-of-Reading-tp5513198p5514450.html
Write him and mention it.
On Sep 9, 2010, at 4:30 AM, Russell Standish wrote:
Did anyuone else get that strange frisson when the author switched
meanings of ventral and dorsal half way through?
On Wed, Sep 08, 2010 at 10:19:35PM -0600, Victoria Hughes wrote:
This post from Jonah Lehrer at Wired discusses the different
processing systems our brains use to read print and screen versions
of text, and offers choices for format, given how we want to
interact with the text, or have our readers interact.
Lehrer has written two books on neuroscience:
How We Decide, and Proust was a Neuroscientist.
The Future Of Reading | Wired Science | Wired.com
The Future Of Reading
By Jonah Lehrer September 8, 2010 | 10:59 pm | Categories:
Frontal Cortex
I think it’s pretty clear that the future of books is digital. I’m
sure we’ll always have deckle-edge hardcovers and mass market
paperbacks, but I imagine the physical version of books will soon
assume a cultural place analogous to that of FM radio. Although the
radio is always there (and isn’t that nice?), I really only use it
when I’m stuck in a rental car and forgot my auxilliary input cord.
The rest of the time I’m relying on shuffle and podcasts.
I love books deeply. I won’t bore you with descriptions of my love
other than to say that, when I moved back from England, I packed 9
pounds of clothes and 45 pounds of books. (I have a weakness for
British covers.) And when my luggage was over the fifty pound
airline limit, I started chucking T-shirts.
So I’m nervous about the rise of the Kindle and the Nook and the
iBookstore. The book, after all, is a time-tested technology. We
know that it can endure, and that the information we encode in
volutes of ink on pulped trees can last for centuries. That’s why we
still have Shakespeare Folios and why I can buy a 150 year old book
on Alibris for 99 cents. There are so many old books!
And yet, I also recognize the astonishing potential of digital texts
and e-readers. For me, the most salient fact is this: It’s never
been easier to buy books, read books, or read about books you might
want to buy. How can that not be good?
That said, I do have a nagging problem with the merger of screens
and sentences. My problem is that consumer technology moves in a
single direction: It’s constantly making it easier for us to
perceive the content. This is why your TV is so high-def, and your
computer monitor is so bright and clear. For the most part, this
technological progress is all to the good. (I still can’t believe
that people watched golf before there were HD screens. Was the ball
even visible? For me, the pleasure of televised golf is all about
the lush clarity of grass.) Nevertheless, I worry that this same
impulse – making content easier and easier to see – could actually
backfire with books. We will trade away understanding for
perception. The words will shimmer on the screen, but the sentences
will be quickly forgotten.
Let me explain. Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the College
de France in Paris, has helped illuminate the neural anatomy of
reading. It turns out that the literate brain contains two distinct
pathways for making sense of words, which are activated in different
contexts. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s direct
and efficient, accounting for the vast majority of our reading. The
process goes like this: We see a group of letters, convert those
letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s semantic
meaning. According to Dehaene, this ventral pathway is turned on by
“routinized, familiar passages” of prose, and relies on a bit of
cortex known as visual word form area (VWFA). When you are a reading
a straightforward sentence, or a paragraph full of tropes and
cliches, you’re almost certainly relying on this ventral neural
highway. As a result, the act of reading seems effortless and easy.
We don’t have to think about the words on the page.
But the ventral route is not the only way to read. The second
reading pathway – it’s known as the dorsal stream – is turned on
whenever we’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence,
perhaps because of an obscure word, or an awkward subclause, or bad
handwriting. (In his experiments, Dehaene activates this pathway in
a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters or filling the prose
with errant punctuation.) Although scientists had previously assumed
that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we became literate,
Deheane’s research demonstrates that even fluent adults are still
forced to occasionally make sense of texts. We’re suddenly conscious
of the words on the page; the automatic act has lost its
automaticity.
This suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of
awareness. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica and rendered on
lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Meanwhile,
unusual sentences with complex clauses and smudged ink tend to
require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the
dorsal pathway. All the extra work – the slight cognitive frisson of
having to decipher the words – wakes us up.
So here’s my wish for e-readers. I’d love them to include a feature
that allows us to undo their ease, to make the act of reading just a
little bit more difficult. Perhaps we need to alter the fonts, or
reduce the contrast, or invert the monochrome color scheme. Our eyes
will need to struggle, and we’ll certainly read slower, but that’s
the point: Only then will we process the text a little less
unconsciously, with less reliance on the dorsal pathway. We won’t
just scan the words – we will contemplate their meaning.
My larger anxiety has to do with the sprawling influence of
technology. Sooner or later, every medium starts to influence the
message. I worry that, before long, we’ll become so used to the
mindless clarity of e-ink – to these screens that keep on getting
better – that the technology will feedback onto the content, making
us less willing to endure harder texts. We’ll forget what it’s like
to flex those ventral muscles, to consciously decipher a literate
clause. And that would be a shame, because not every sentence should
be easy to read.
Bonus point: I sometimes wonder why I’m only able to edit my own
writing after it has been printed out, in 3-D form. My prose will
always look so flawless on the screen, but then I read the same
words on the physical page and I suddenly see all my clichés and
banalities and excesses. Why is this the case? Why do I only notice
my mistakes after they’re printed on dead trees? I think the same
ventral/dorsal explanation applies. I’m so used to seeing my words
on the screen – after all, I wrote them on the screen – that seeing
them in a slightly different form provides enough tension to awake
my ventral stream, restoring a touch of awareness to the process of
reading. And that’s when I get out my red pen.
Bonus bonus point: Perhaps the pleasure of reading on my Kindle –
it’s so light in the hand, with such nicely rendered fonts –
explains why it has quickly become an essential part of my sleep
routine. The fact that it’s easier to read might explain why it’s
also easier for me to fall asleep.
Read More http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/frontal-cortex#ixzz0z0Dm3O8X
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