![]() ![]() ![]() “I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” ![]() This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.” “It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel. “I give it a few seconds - not even minutes - and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.īut it’s not just online anymore. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to. ![]() Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. ![]()
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