(no subject)
Sep. 17th, 2014 09:45 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seekingferrethttp://www.wnyc.org/story/reading-screens-messing-your-brain-so-train-it-be-bi-literate/
In which I am skeptical about research in the social sciences and the reporting thereof, news at 11.
Did you know that Twitter is rotting your brain? Well, I'm not on Twitter, so my brain's not rotting, but you, all of you who use Twitter, your brains are rotting away because of Twitter. Well, and also because... get this! : You have no gene for reading!!!!!!
"In the old days before the internet, reading was a linear event," Mike Rosenwald.
Except for all the times in which it wasn't. Like reading a newspaper with columns that you could jump between. Or flipping past a boring chapter in a book to get to an interesting one, or flipping to the end of the book to find out who killed Roger Ackroyd. Or walking down a busy main street looking at all the signs on storefronts. Or, you know, reading the Talmud.
"The human brain is almost adapting too well to the particular attributes or characteristics of internet reading," says Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University.
This is because unlike such skills as seeing, there is no gene in the human genome for reading, the story tells us. It is something scary called a learned skill, which means that the human brain is forced to rewire ancient brain circuits in order to read. But if you exercise those brain circuits in the WRONG WAY, meaning using Twitter, you will reprogram your brain so that you are not capable of 'reading linearly'. (In other news, sometimes it is hilarious when you take a metaphor and extend it too far just to see what happens.)
How do we know this twitter brain rot is happening? Because RESEARCHERS gave 25 people a story on paper, and 25 people the same story on a Kindle, and the ones who read it on paper were better able to describe the order of events in the story. "Significantly" better, in fact. Of course, somehow science reporters still have not figured out that statisticians use the word significantly to mean something entirely different than what the general public thinks it means. For a statistician, it means that there was a difference between the two groups that was not explainable by pure chance in the sampling. For the general public, it means that there was a difference between the two groups that was big enough that we should care about it.
In this case, the researcher has not yet published her result, only discussed it with reporters and presented it at a conference, so I cannot tell which it is, but I rather suspect it's the former. BECAUSE IN SCIENCE JOURNALISM, IT'S ALWAYS STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT, NOT ACTUALLY SIGNIFICANT.
To be fair, there's other proof. This one guy who works at the Washington Post thought he was reading less deeply than he used to, so he called a few friends and they said "Me too!". And then they all said "It must be the Internet!" I AM NOT JOKING, THIS IS PART OF THE NEWS REPORT.
I think it is likely that we read books differently than we do internet things, and I think it is likely that the things we choose to read are also teaching us how to read, but these intuitions do not extend to claims about how the internet has reprogrammed out brains so that we can't read deeply anymore. Because the brain is really complicated and we mostly don't understand it. And because I have read the first 11 books of the Wheel of Time on my ereader over the last two months, linearly.
In which I am skeptical about research in the social sciences and the reporting thereof, news at 11.
Did you know that Twitter is rotting your brain? Well, I'm not on Twitter, so my brain's not rotting, but you, all of you who use Twitter, your brains are rotting away because of Twitter. Well, and also because... get this! : You have no gene for reading!!!!!!
"In the old days before the internet, reading was a linear event," Mike Rosenwald.
Except for all the times in which it wasn't. Like reading a newspaper with columns that you could jump between. Or flipping past a boring chapter in a book to get to an interesting one, or flipping to the end of the book to find out who killed Roger Ackroyd. Or walking down a busy main street looking at all the signs on storefronts. Or, you know, reading the Talmud.
"The human brain is almost adapting too well to the particular attributes or characteristics of internet reading," says Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University.
This is because unlike such skills as seeing, there is no gene in the human genome for reading, the story tells us. It is something scary called a learned skill, which means that the human brain is forced to rewire ancient brain circuits in order to read. But if you exercise those brain circuits in the WRONG WAY, meaning using Twitter, you will reprogram your brain so that you are not capable of 'reading linearly'. (In other news, sometimes it is hilarious when you take a metaphor and extend it too far just to see what happens.)
How do we know this twitter brain rot is happening? Because RESEARCHERS gave 25 people a story on paper, and 25 people the same story on a Kindle, and the ones who read it on paper were better able to describe the order of events in the story. "Significantly" better, in fact. Of course, somehow science reporters still have not figured out that statisticians use the word significantly to mean something entirely different than what the general public thinks it means. For a statistician, it means that there was a difference between the two groups that was not explainable by pure chance in the sampling. For the general public, it means that there was a difference between the two groups that was big enough that we should care about it.
In this case, the researcher has not yet published her result, only discussed it with reporters and presented it at a conference, so I cannot tell which it is, but I rather suspect it's the former. BECAUSE IN SCIENCE JOURNALISM, IT'S ALWAYS STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT, NOT ACTUALLY SIGNIFICANT.
To be fair, there's other proof. This one guy who works at the Washington Post thought he was reading less deeply than he used to, so he called a few friends and they said "Me too!". And then they all said "It must be the Internet!" I AM NOT JOKING, THIS IS PART OF THE NEWS REPORT.
I think it is likely that we read books differently than we do internet things, and I think it is likely that the things we choose to read are also teaching us how to read, but these intuitions do not extend to claims about how the internet has reprogrammed out brains so that we can't read deeply anymore. Because the brain is really complicated and we mostly don't understand it. And because I have read the first 11 books of the Wheel of Time on my ereader over the last two months, linearly.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 03:01 pm (UTC)And the Internet is pretty much the definition of linear reading, especially with the advent of infinite scroll. There's no pages to flip through: you just read down and down and down. It's like a return to the era of the scroll. There would be an interesting research project: compare people's reading of paged books versus infinitely scrolling Internet documents versus paper scrolls versus paged Internet documents.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 03:19 pm (UTC)Generally the web allows one's reading to branch easily, thanks be to tabbed browsing, and good web pages like Wikipedia articles or well-chaptered AO3 stories allow skipping around equally. While it's a somewhat different experience that flipping around books, I think it's comparable and no more necessarily linear.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 03:47 pm (UTC)I came in here to say EXACTLY THIS. (This is why even though I adore my Kindle, I buy paper copies of anything I like enough on first read to want to read multiple times.)
In fact, I could make a (completely unsupported by actual data, of course) argument that the very nonlinearity is why paper reading might support better recall of events -- because you can go back easily to check what happened, flip backwards and forwards to find resonances, etc.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 03:52 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-18 02:23 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-17 03:06 pm (UTC).
...ooops, put that way it doesn't actually sound like news.
(Also, "not as good at describing order of events accurately" doesn't actually mean "didn't understand as well", because those are measuring two different things. ALSO ALSO I actually read more linearly on a Kindle than in a paper book, because of the skipping around/flipping pages thing you describe, whereas ebook readers almost AGGRESSIVELY try to force you into linear reading, even when a book's layout isn't meant to be linear. So I wouldn't be surprised if it turns out we're actually better able to describe order of events if we're given the freedom to skip around and read non-linearly. Like on paper. Or social media.)
(no subject)
Date: 2014-09-18 02:13 pm (UTC)I just... the thing about the Washington Post reporter and his friends got to me. It could be so many other things besides twitter! It could be that he and his friends are reaching a certain age, and can no longer focus the way they could when they were younger. It could be that they're all in stressful jobs and stress is harming their ability to focus. It could be something in the Washington, D.C. water supply! It could be reading John Grisham novels that deprogrammed them! It could all be an illusion, that they're not actually getting worse at reading, since they hardly took reliable measurements of their prior ability to 'read linearly.'
The whole thing is such crappy reporting.