Too many digital distractions are eroding our ability to read deeply

Hello and welcome to the Conversation Weekly. I am Dan Marino in San Francisco. And I am Nihal Elhadi in Toronto.

Dan, do you read a lot? Yeah, I'd say so. I go through ups and downs with my reading consumption, though.

Currently in a bit of a down phase. Did you always read a lot? Yeah, I did.

And like when I was growing up, I would I was really into like sci fi and fantasy and would just get, you know, those six book series and be up way too late for a nine year old.

My mom would have to like come down and steal my book from me because I'd be like under the covers in my room reading. See, I'm like you. I love reading.

I will read almost anything I can get my hands on. But I'm also the mother of two school-aged children.

And I would love for them to have the same kind of affinity for reading that I do.

But they have to contend with so many distractions. Yeah, I got to imagine that's really hard for kids, right?

Because even me, as an adult who, in theory, grew up and has better self-control than a child,

I get distracted by my phone at night all the time. I'll be lying in bed and want to read, and then I get a text from my friend, and then somebody sends me a funny video, and then all of a sudden it's like midnight, and I'm like, oh, crap, I need to go to bed.

I imagine it's really hard for kids these days to take the time and focus. I've been thinking about it a lot.

And so this episode is about the exponential growth of digital media, devices and screens,

all the information that we have surrounding us constantly, all of these demands in our attention.

What have they done to our ability to read and comprehend? What exactly happens in our brains when we engage with digital media?

And how can we adapt to this changing environment of infoglut, where we're bombarded with information and distractions constantly?

We'll start by specifically looking at our ability to read and how it's changed over time. I am Marianne Wolfe.

I'm the director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice

within the School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA.

I'm a cognitive neuroscientist and educator, and my mission is to empower literate beings around the world.

Marianne first began thinking about the value of reading when she was volunteering in a program for teachers to help in underfunded schools in Hawaii.

They sent us to rural Hawaii,

where there were plantations that were basically indenturing families, especially from the Philippines, but from Vietnam.

Throughout the 19th century, much of Hawaii's economy was controlled by powerful U.S.-based businesses and plantation owners who would bring in indentured laborers and their families, mainly from East and Southeast Asia.

When the U.S. officially annexed Hawaii in 1898, the recruitment of foreign workers became illegal, but many of the workers who had come to the islands remained in exploitative labor contracts and poverty.

I had almost 10 languages being spoken and about 22 kids in my classroom.

And I had never

been in a situation where the beauty of

nature obfuscated the unbelievable poverty of people

who had only tickets or coupons to buy groceries at a terrible store where I will never forget seeing worms come out of the lettuce.

And the life of the children was simply a hope that they could learn enough not to repeat the indentured servitude of their family.

or the men who sat in

rocking chairs at night alone in these Quonset huts because they had never earned enough money to bring their family, despite all the promises of the plantations.

This was in Hawaii, and if it were true in Hawaii,

I could only imagine how true it was in countries across the world.

So Marianne decided that she was going to study the impact of literacy and reading on people's lives.

And that's when I discovered neuroscience and linguistics.

And from that point on, my goal

was to understand how the

reading brain ever comes to be and how we can translate that knowledge into teaching children who have struggles, children in poverty.

And then I discovered dyslexia and the

toll that takes at every level on children who are not able to read because of a neurobiological organization of their brain.