第1段

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older kids don’t read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on tablets or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds. Unbeknown to most of us, an invisible, game-changing transformation links everyone in this picture: the neuronal circuit that underlies the brain’s ability to read is subtly, rapidly changing and this has implications for everyone from the pre-reading toddler to the expert adult.

第2段

As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species’ brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one’s herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain. My research depicts how the present reading brain enables the development of some of our most important intellectual and affective processes: internalized knowledge, analogical reasoning, and inference; perspective-taking and empathy; critical analysis and the generation of insight. Research surfacing in many parts of the world now cautions that each of these essential ‘deep reading’ processes may be under threat as we move into digital-based modes of reading.

第3段

This is not a simple, binary issue of print versus digital reading and technological innovation. As MIT scholar Sherry Turkle has written, we do not err as a society when we innovate but when we ignore what we disrupt or diminish while innovating. In this hinge moment between print and digital cultures, society needs to confront what is diminishing in the expert reading circuit, what our children and older students are not developing, and what we can do about it.

第4段

We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment’s requirements – from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used. If the dominant medium advantages processes that are fast, multi-task oriented and well-suited for large volumes of information, like the current digital medium, so will the reading circuit. As UCLA psychologist Patricia Greenfield writes, the result is that less attention and time will be allocated to slower, time-demanding deep reading processes.

第5段

Increasing reports from educators and from researchers in psychology and the humanities bear this out. English literature scholar and teacher Mark Edmundson describes how many college students actively avoid the classic literature of the 19th and 20th centuries in favour of something simpler as they no longer have the patience to read longer, denser, more difficult texts. We should be less concerned with students’ ‘cognitive impatience’, however, than by what may underlie it: the potential inability of large numbers of students to read with a level of critical analysis sufficient to comprehend the complexity of thought and argument found in more demanding texts.

第6段

Multiple studies show that digital screen use may be causing a variety of troubling downstream effects on reading comprehension in older high school and college students. In Stavanger, Norway, psychologist Anne Mangen and her colleagues studied how high school students comprehend the same material in different mediums. Mangen’s group asked subjects questions about a short story whose plot had universal student appeal; half of the students read the story on a tablet, the other half in paperback. Results indicated that students who read on print were superior in their comprehension to screen-reading peers, particularly in their ability to sequence detail and reconstruct the plot in chronological order.

第7段

Ziming Liu from San Jose State University has conducted a series of studies which indicate that the ‘new norm’ in reading is skimming, involving word-spotting and browsing through the text. Many readers now use a pattern when reading in which they sample the first line and then word-spot through the rest of the text. When the reading brain skims like this, it reduces time allocated to deep reading processes. In other words, we don’t have time to grasp complexity, to understand another’s feelings, to perceive beauty, and to create thoughts of the reader’s own.

第8段

The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes could become the unintended ‘collateral damage’ of our digital culture is not a straightforward binary issue about print versus digital reading. It is about how we all have begun to read on various mediums and how that changes not only what we read, but also the purposes for which we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all equally. It affects our ability to navigate a constant bombardment of information. It incentivizes a retreat to the most familiar stores of unchecked information, which require and receive no analysis, leaving us susceptible to false information and irrational ideas.

第9段

There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice. The story of the changing reading brain is hardly finished. We possess both the science and the technology to identify and redress the changes in how we read before they become entrenched. If we work to understand exactly what we will lose, alongside the extraordinary new capacities that the digital world has brought us, there is as much reason for excitement as caution.

在你下次乘飞机时四周看看。iPad现在是婴儿和幼儿的新安抚剂。年龄较小的学龄儿童在智能手机上阅读故事；年龄较大的孩子根本不阅读，而是低头玩电子游戏。父母和其他乘客在平板电脑上阅读或匆匆浏览一系列电子邮件和新闻源。大多数人都不知道，一个无形的、具有改变游戏规则的转变将这张图片中的每个人联系起来：支持大脑阅读能力的神经回路在微妙而迅速地改变，这对从刚开始阅读的幼儿到专业成年人都有影响。

根据神经科学的研究，超过6000年前，识字能力的习得在我们人类的大脑中形成了一个新的回路。这个回路从一个非常简单的解码基本信息的机制发展而来，比如羊群中的数量，发展到目前高度复杂的阅读大脑。我的研究描绘了现在的阅读大脑如何促进我们最重要的智力和情感过程的发展：内化的知识、类比推理和推断；换位思考和共情；批判性分析和洞察力的生成。世界各地的研究现在都在提醒我们，随着我们进入基于数字的阅读模式，每个这些重要的“深度阅读”过程可能都面临威胁。

这不是一个简单的二元问题，即纸质阅读与数字阅读和技术创新之间的问题。正如麻省理工学院学者谢里·图克尔所写的，当我们创新时，我们并不会犯错误，而是在于忽视了我们在创新过程中打乱或削弱的东西。在纸质与数字文化之间的这个关键时刻，社会需要面对专家阅读回路中正在减弱的内容，我们的孩子和年长学生没有在发展的内容，以及我们能够做些什么。

我们从研究中了解到，阅读回路不像视觉或语言那样通过遗传蓝图给予人类；它需要一个环境来发展。此外，它将适应该环境的要求-从不同的书写系统到所使用的媒介的特征。如果主导媒介有利于快速、多任务导向和适合处理大量信息的过程，比如当前的数字媒介，那么阅读回路也会如此。正如加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校的心理学家帕特里夏·格林菲尔德所写，结果是更少的注意力和时间被分配给较慢、时间需求较高的深度阅读过程。

教育工作者和心理学、人文学科的研究人员越来越多地报告了这一点。英国文学学者和教师马克·埃德蒙森描述了许多大学生如何积极回避19世纪和20世纪的经典文学，而更喜欢一些更简单的东西，因为他们不再有耐心阅读更长、更密集、更困难的文本。然而，我们应该更关注学生“认知不耐烦”背后的原因，而不是这种现象本身：大量学生可能无法以足够的批判分析水平阅读理解更复杂的思想和论证所在的更具要求的文本。

多项研究表明，数字屏幕的使用可能会对高中和大学年级的学生的阅读理解产生各种令人担忧的下游影响。挪威斯塔万格市的心理学家安妮·曼根及其同事研究了高中生如何理解不同媒介中的相同材料。曼根的团队向受试者提出了关于一个具有普遍学生吸引力的短篇小说的问题；一半的学生在平板电脑上阅读，另一半在平装书上阅读。结果表明，纸质阅读的学生在理解能力上优于阅读屏幕的同龄人，尤其是在他们对细节排序和按照时间顺序重建情节的能力上。

来自圣何塞州立大学的刘子明进行了一系列研究，表明阅读中的“新常态”是浏览，涉及到逐词查找和浏览文本的过程。现在许多读者在阅读时都有一种模式，他们先阅读第一行，然后逐词浏览剩下的文本。当阅读大脑这样匆匆浏览时，它减少了用于深度阅读过程的时间。换句话说，我们没有时间理解复杂性，理解他人的感受，感知美感，以及产生自己的思想。

我们的数字文化可能会导致批判分析、共情和其他深度阅读过程成为无意中的“附带损害”，这不仅仅是一个关于纸质阅读与数字阅读的简单二元问题。它关于我们所有人都开始在各种媒介上阅读，以及这不仅改变了我们阅读的内容，还改变了我们阅读的目的。这不仅仅关乎年轻人。批判分析和共情的微妙萎缩对我们所有人都产生同等的影响。它影响我们应对持续不断的信息轰炸的能力。它鼓励我们退回到最熟悉的未经分析的信息来源，这些来源不需要也不接受分析，使我们容易受到虚假信息和非理性观点的影响。

在神经科学中有一个不随年龄改变的古老原则：要么用掉，要么失去。当应用于阅读大脑中的批判思维时，这是一个非常有希望的原则，因为它暗示了选择。关于阅读大脑的变化的故事还远未结束。我们拥有科学和技术来在这些变化深入扎根之前识别并纠正。如果我们努力了解我们将失去什么，以及数字世界带给我们的非凡新能力，我们就有足够的理由既兴奋又谨慎。