Does the Brain Like E-Books?

Amazon KindleMario Tama/Getty Images Curling up with a Kindle.

Writing and reading — from newspapers to novels, academic reports to gossip magazines — are migrating ever faster to digital screens, like laptops, Kindles and cellphones. Traditional book publishers are putting out “vooks,” which place videos in electronic text that can be read online or on an iPhone. Others are republishing old books in electronic form. And libraries, responding to demand, are offering more e-books for download.

Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper? Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?


A New Metaphor for Reading

Alan Liu

Alan Liu is chairman and professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where he researches the relation between literature and information culture. He is head of the Transliteracies U.C. Multi-Campus Research Group on online reading practices and technologies.

Initially, any new information medium seems to degrade reading because it disturbs the balance between focal and peripheral attention. This was true as early as the invention of writing, which Plato complained hollowed out focal memory. Similarly, William Wordsworth’s sister complained that he wasted his mind in the newspapers of the day. It takes time and adaptation before a balance can be restored, not just in the “mentality” of the reader, as historians of the book like to say, but in the social systems that complete the reading environment.

Current forms of digital media behave nothing like ‘books’ or ‘libraries,’ and cause users to swing between two kinds of bad reading.

Right now, networked digital media do a poor job of balancing focal and peripheral attention. We swing between two kinds of bad reading. We suffer tunnel vision, as when reading a single page, paragraph, or even “keyword in context” without an organized sense of the whole. Or we suffer marginal distraction, as when feeds or blogrolls in the margin (“sidebar”) of a blog let the whole blogosphere in.

My research group on online reading (the University of California Transliteracies Project) has come to realize that we need a whole new guiding metaphor. So many of today’s commercial, academic and open-source reading environments are governed by metaphors of what I call “containing structures.”

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A Test of Character

Sandra Aamodt

Sandra Aamodt is a former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience. She is co-author of “Welcome to Your Brain: Why You Lose Your Car Keys but Never Forget How to Drive and Other Puzzles of Everyday Life.”

Electronic reading has become progressively easier as computer screens have improved and readers have grown accustomed to using them. Still, people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. Fifteen or 20 years ago, electronic reading also impaired comprehension compared to paper, but those differences have faded in recent studies.

Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.

Reading on screen requires slightly more effort and thus is more tiring, but the differences are small and probably matter only for difficult tasks. Paper retains substantial advantages, though, for types of reading that require flipping back and forth between pages, such as articles with end notes or figures.

To a great extent, the computer’s usefulness for serious reading depends on the user’s strength of character. Distractions abound on most people’s computer screens. The reading speed reported in academic studies does not include delays induced by clicking away from the text to see the new email that just arrived or check out what’s new on your favorite blog. In one study, workers switched tasks about every three minutes and took over 23 minutes on average to return to a task. Frequent task switching costs time and interferes with the concentration needed to think deeply about what you read.

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Beyond Decoding Words

Maryanne Wolf

Maryanne Wolf is the John DiBiaggio Professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts, and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.”

After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read. We learn to do so by an extraordinarily ingenuous ability to rearrange our “original parts” — like language and vision, both of which have genetic programs that unfold in fairly orderly fashion within any nurturant environment. Reading isn’t like that.

readingFranka Bruns/Associated Press

Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new “reading circuit” afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity.

Equally interesting, this tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the particular requirements of the writing system: for example, Chinese reading circuits require more visual memory than alphabets. This “open architecture” of the reading circuit makes the young reader’s developing circuit malleable to what the medium (e.g., digital online reading, book, etc) emphasizes.

And that, of course, is the problem at hand. No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain. We do know a great deal, however, about the formation of what we know as the expert reading brain that most of us possess to this point in history.

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The Book Made Better

David Gelernter

David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale University, is the author of “Judaism: A Way of Being,” which will be published in November. In a recent conversation at Edge.org he discusses his role in the invention of lifestreaming and “the cloud” in computing.

All reading is not migrating to computer screens. So long as books are cheap, tough, easy to “read” from outside (What kind of book is this? How long is it? Is this the one I was reading last week? Let’s flip to the pictures), easy to mark up, rated for safe operation from beaches to polar wastes and — above all — beautiful, they will remain the best of all word-delivery vehicles.

Technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa.

I assume that technology will soon start moving in the natural direction: integrating chips into books, not vice versa. I might like to make a book beep when I can’t find it, search its text online, download updates and keep an eye on reviews and discussion. This would all be easily handled by electronics worked into the binding. Such upgraded books acquire some of the bad traits of computer text — but at least, if the circuitry breaks or the battery runs out, I’ve still got a book.

Of course, onscreen text will change and improve. But the physical side of reading depends not on the bad aspects of computer screens but on the brilliance of the traditional book — sheets bound on end, the “codex” — which remains the most brilliant design of the last several thousand years. Technologists have (as usual) decreed its disappearance without bothering to understand it. They make the same mistake clever planners have made for half a century in forecasting the death of cars and their replacement by spiffier technology. The problem is, people like cars.

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The Effects of Perpetual Distraction

Gloria Mark

Gloria Mark is a professor in the Department of Informatics, University of California, Irvine. She studies human-computer interaction.

When PC’s first entered the home in the 1980s, a number of studies comparing the effects of reading on an electronic display versus paper showed that reading was slower on a screen. However, displays have vastly improved since then, and now with high resolution monitors reading speed is no different than reading from paper.

When online, people switch activities an average of every three minutes (e.g. reading email or IM) and switch projects about every 10 and a half minutes.

So what is different? It is not just a matter of comparing reaction times or reading comprehension; it’s the entire experience. Reading a Google book enables the reader to search for words or passages throughout the text. It’s effortless to skip to a juicy section or to go back and reread a memorable part. Contrast how long it takes to skim to a particular passage in a paper book, unless of course it is bookmarked or the page corner is bent.

Hypertext offers loads of advantages. If while reading online you come across the name “Antaeus” and forget your Greek mythology, a hyperlink will take you directly to an online source where you are reminded that he was the Libyan giant who fought Hercules. And if you’re prone to distraction, you can follow another link to find out his lineage, and on and on. That is the duality of hyperlinks. A hyperlink brings you to information faster but is also more of a distraction.

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