Kevin Kelly, Paul Saffo, Marvin Minsky, Gary Small, Anne Mangen, Maryanne Wolf

I told this to Kevin Kelly today at his Technium blog:

Another thing that also needs to be studied, Kevin. I am convinced that reading on paper (“reading”) is so very different from reading on screens (“screening”, or as Marvin Minsky at the MIT Media Lab likes to call it, “screen-reading”) both mentally and emotionally, and not a prioro better or worse, just different, as Paul Saffo has said, that we need to study these differences in terms of which parts of the brain light up and in what different kinds of ways when we read on paper and when we “screen” online or on a Kindle. I would love to see Gary Small use MRI scans to study how sustained reading on paper and sustained screening on a screen differ in terms of brain chemisty and what this might mean for the future of the technium. I am sure the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain are impacted very very differently when we read on paper from when we screen-read on screens. We need to study this. Anne Mangen in Norway and Maryanne Wolf at Tufts have already dipped their toes into the water here. Read them. Gary Small, study THIS!