Screening on E-Readers vs Reading on Paper: Divergent Views on What We Can Do About This
An online discussion of the future of books and the future of e-readers.
The Question Was: RE: Brain scan research on reading on paper vs. reading on screens
Have you or any of your colleagaues ever done any research on brain
scans and reading? Can you point me in a good direction? Any contacts,
people you think might be able to help get to the bottom of this?
Thanks.
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/10/hogwash-statement-by-danny-bloom.html
ANSWERS CAME IN FROM SEVERAL EXPERTS AND PROFESSORS ON TOP OF THESE ISSUES:
Professor A: Personally, Danny, I don't think we're going to learn what we need to know from brain scans. Neuroscience is at a very primitive stage.
Professor B: I don't think brain scans will get you "to the bottom of" an issue like this. The questions are too complicated, too vague, and too little understood, and there are too many other variables. "Hard" scientific methods in psychology are good at giving answers to very, very specific questions.
Professor C: While it's true that the bottom of any issue is elusive, there has actually
been a lot of psycholinguistic research using brain scans -- much of it
focused on the way brains react to different gramatical and syntactical
phenomena (not necessarily while reading). For instance, the brain tends to
neurologically "enact" verbs, which can elicit a whole chain of brain events
analogous to those accompanying a physical action, but nouns elicit a simple
point event, suggesting that the brain just "looks up" the meaning of a
noun. The study above focuses on the effects of Shakespeare's use of nouns
as verbs. [ http://www.physorg.com/news85664210.html ]
and
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427121635.htm
Another link, a little more directly relevant. It should be easy to think
up experiments to see if reading a passage on a big screen or a Kindle
elicits the same responses as on a book or newspaper page, even if it is
hard to know what those responses might mean.
Professor D: There is a great deal of research out there using brain scans to make
claims about the cognitive processes of reading and writing. I would
love to be able to use this sort of work, but I remain sceptical for
reasons that this recent piece of research demonstrates very well:
[ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon ]
Professor E: The work of Maryanne Wolf at Tufts strikes me as particularly relevant
to your interest in the neurological bases of reading.
http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/
And her book: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain.
Professor F: This is a bit of a tangent, but I heard an NPR interview with a Stanford
researcher about multi-tasking and its negative effects on cognition. It
strikes me as pertinent because so much of new media is about multiple
communications -- chats -- videos -- etc. presented so as to interact with
the electronic text:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html
Reporter G: Mark Bauerlein, noted author and professor at Emory, has a good
commentary today, his own POV and an overview of the work of Dr Anne
Mangen in Norway,
at the Chronicle of Higher Education here:
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Screen-ReadingPrint/8551/
Professor H: I believe that this information about multi-tasking is probably more
relevant to the original question about reading on screen vs. reading
a book. The best understanding we can get is not going to be in very
high-tech brain scans but in the phenomenological aspect of something
we call "attention." I know that I prefer to listen to music when I
read because were I to do anything more "attention-getting," I would
be distracted or lose my reading "attention" while the music is
pleasant, doesn't distract, and may mask minor ambient noises.
Now I realize that a great deal of this has to do with the way I was
"socialized." I was not raised in a multi-tasking milieu. I can
listen to the radio and drive, but I can't carry on a conversation,
listen to the radio and drive without losing something from all of
these functions. So the response is phenomenological and individual
to the person involved.
Reading from a screen specifically has its own set of problems. If
one is used to reading from print, the actual eye-movements across
the page are usually routinized because pages do not differ in
appearance too often from one another. I believe this assists both
speed and comprehension of the text. Type size can influence the
length of time to read and comprehend a given portion of
text. Reading on a screen means the eyes are scanning a different
line length, and often a different reading environment in terms of
whether the screen is one line of text after another or if other
items or "objects" are interspersed on the page of a screened text.
For instance, reading an item on a screen where there is an animated
ad next to the text can be very distracting. Incidentally, if it
takes too much of my attention away from the text and I actually
"see" the ad, my response is not what the advertiser was looking for
because I become quite resentful of the distraction. Similarly, when
reading newspaper text next to an ad usually doesn't distract from my
reading, and the ad generally goes unnoticed.
Since I do not read on dedicated electronic readers where there is
only text, I have no opinion about these new electronic readers. I
prefer the codex, but again, that is also attributable to my
"socialization." If someone learns to read on a screen during one's
formative years, there probably will be a more positive reading
result than someone who learns this new skill at a later age. Again,
this is difficult to test because people ordinarily read at different
rates of speed and levels of comprehension.
Professor I: I believe that this information about multi-tasking is probably more
relevant to the original question about reading on screen vs. reading
a book. The best understanding we can get is not going to be in very
high-tech brain scans but in the phenomenological aspect of something
we call "attention." I know that I prefer to listen to music when I
read because were I to do anything more "attention-getting," I would
be distracted or lose my reading "attention" while the music is
pleasant, doesn't distract, and may mask minor ambient noises.
Now I realize that a great deal of this has to do with the way I was
"socialized." I was not raised in a multi-tasking milieu. I can
listen to the radio and drive, but I can't carry on a conversation,
listen to the radio and drive without losing something from all of
these functions. So the response is phenomenological and individual
to the person involved.
Professor J: This is very much the old deep and slow versus the new fast and thin reading
that I ref in my new book! I think something is building.....
Professor K: I think the answer is inside us. How to live with any new technology is ultimately a philosophical question. Always has been, always will be. We need a new philosophy for living with digital devices. That's what my book wil really be about, when it is released next year.
Professor O: It does not take brain scans to detect the superficial grasp many
students are getting from reading eTexts, etc. Most of us, aside from
looking up "directory" items, hit the "print" key when we need to read
long excerpts and we do it for comprehension and speed, not the feel
of paper.
Very solid research exists by ***Charles Bigelow (type fonts) and
Gordon Legge ("Psychophysics of Reading in Normal and Low Vision").
To the children born in the future, we may ask them if they want a
100% read-on-paper life or a 70% read-on-screen life.
Blogger L: I've heard, Danny, about your campaign to try to coin a neologism to describe the behavior we undertake when we seek to decode and comprehend text displayed on computer screens. You're concerned that this behavior and its impact on brains is fundamentally different from "reading," and that neuroscientists may not be paying sufficient attention to this emergent phenomenon. As you say:
to search for a new word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on
paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and surveys, but with hard science -- that is to say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms to study -- firsthand! up close and personal! -- white matter and grey matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on a screen.
Indeed there already is a great deal of interest among neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and educators in the neurology, the biology, of reading. Researchers are using MRI and other technologies, along with tried-and-true cognitive testing, to limn the circuits that reading forges and follows in the brain. And some of these researchers are turning their interest on the question of reading v. "screening," as Bloom says. A few links—
Jonah Lehrer, a friend of mine and a great science writer, covers this topic in a recent blog post (see his book Proust was a Neuroscientist for much more):
He cites a recent brain imaging study comparing brain pathways of "expert reading" to those of struggling readers:
There's the recent NYTimes piece polling various sorts of experts on the brain's receptivity to ebooks (which includes David Gelertner's short piece, which I link to in my reverse e-book post):
And Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, subtitled The Story of Science and the Reading Brain. Wolf (who also gets space in the Times feature linked to above) is especially concerned about the neural implications of the switch from paper to screens.
Of course to say "paper to screens" is a massive simplification of the transformation that's underway. The cognitive, cultural, and technological shift we're experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them ... every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It's nearly impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What's the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we've gone from "claying" to "papyring" to "velluming" to "papering" to "screening," our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where do we locate "reading" in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation itself represent the essence of "reading"?
New means of putting text together are also new ways of putting the brain together. But that neural plasticity is what we do as humans; that, in a word, is reading, whatever the media.
Professor W: I have no doubt that the new mediums [like E-Books] will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.
For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).
Blogger Q: Like Dr Maryanne Wolf, I'm mildly concerned that we're slowly losing the talent for long-form immersion. I struggled through a Tolstoy epic a few months ago, and though I finished the book - after falling asleep to the same page for several weeks - I couldn't help but get frustrated at all the digressions and interruptions. I'm ashamed of my impatience, but in a world oversaturated with information I wonder if it's increasingly hard to savor the languid process of reading a really long book. Our attention is a scarce resource, and there's more competition for that resource than ever before.
That said, I don't worry too much about the effect of E-Books on the reading brain. I think one of the most interesting findings regarding literacy and the human cortex is the fact that there are actually two distinct pathways activated by the sight of letters. (The brain is stuffed full of redundancies.) As the lab of Stanislas Dehaene has found, when people are reading "routinized, familiar passages" a part of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA, or the ventral pathway) is activated. This pathway processes letters and words in parallel, allowing us to read quickly and effortlessly. It's the pathway that literate readers almost always rely upon.
But Dehaene and colleagues have also found a second reading pathway in the brain, which is activated when we're reading prose that is "unfamiliar". (The scientists trigger this effect in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters, or using a hard to read font, or filling the prose with obscure words.) As expected, when the words were more degraded or unusual, subjects took longer to comprehend them. By studying this process in an fMRI machine, Dehaene could see why: reading text that was highly degraded or presented in an unusual fashion meant that we relied on a completely different neural route, known as the dorsal reading pathway. Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we learned how to read, Deheane's research demonstrates that even literate adults still rely, in some situations, on the same patterns of brain activity as a first-grader, carefully sounding out the syllables.
What does this have to do with E-Books? This research suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of fluency. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica activate the ventral route, while difficult prose filled with jargon and fancy words and printed in an illegible font require us to use the slow dorsal route. Here's my rampant speculation (and it's pure speculation because no one has brought a Kindle into a scanner): new reading formats (such as computer screens or E-Books) might initially require a bit more dorsal processing, as our visual cortex adjusts to the image. (One has to remember that printed books have been evolving to fit the peculiar sensory habits of the brain for hundreds of years - they're a pretty perfect cultural product.) But then, after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.
The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don't feel as "effortless" or "automatic" as old-fashioned books. But here's the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.
The Question Was: RE: Brain scan research on reading on paper vs. reading on screens
Have you or any of your colleagaues ever done any research on brain
scans and reading? Can you point me in a good direction? Any contacts,
people you think might be able to help get to the bottom of this?
Thanks.
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/2009/10/hogwash-statement-by-danny-bloom.html
ANSWERS CAME IN FROM SEVERAL EXPERTS AND PROFESSORS ON TOP OF THESE ISSUES:
Professor A: Personally, Danny, I don't think we're going to learn what we need to know from brain scans. Neuroscience is at a very primitive stage.
Professor B: I don't think brain scans will get you "to the bottom of" an issue like this. The questions are too complicated, too vague, and too little understood, and there are too many other variables. "Hard" scientific methods in psychology are good at giving answers to very, very specific questions.
Professor C: While it's true that the bottom of any issue is elusive, there has actually
been a lot of psycholinguistic research using brain scans -- much of it
focused on the way brains react to different gramatical and syntactical
phenomena (not necessarily while reading). For instance, the brain tends to
neurologically "enact" verbs, which can elicit a whole chain of brain events
analogous to those accompanying a physical action, but nouns elicit a simple
point event, suggesting that the brain just "looks up" the meaning of a
noun. The study above focuses on the effects of Shakespeare's use of nouns
as verbs. [ http://www.physorg.com/news85664210.html ]
and
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/04/090427121635.htm
Another link, a little more directly relevant. It should be easy to think
up experiments to see if reading a passage on a big screen or a Kindle
elicits the same responses as on a book or newspaper page, even if it is
hard to know what those responses might mean.
Professor D: There is a great deal of research out there using brain scans to make
claims about the cognitive processes of reading and writing. I would
love to be able to use this sort of work, but I remain sceptical for
reasons that this recent piece of research demonstrates very well:
[ http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/fmrisalmon ]
Professor E: The work of Maryanne Wolf at Tufts strikes me as particularly relevant
to your interest in the neurological bases of reading.
http://ase.tufts.edu/crlr/
And her book: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the
Reading Brain.
Professor F: This is a bit of a tangent, but I heard an NPR interview with a Stanford
researcher about multi-tasking and its negative effects on cognition. It
strikes me as pertinent because so much of new media is about multiple
communications -- chats -- videos -- etc. presented so as to interact with
the electronic text:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/august24/multitask-research-study-082409.html
Reporter G: Mark Bauerlein, noted author and professor at Emory, has a good
commentary today, his own POV and an overview of the work of Dr Anne
Mangen in Norway,
at the Chronicle of Higher Education here:
http://chronicle.com/blogPost/Screen-ReadingPrint/8551/
Professor H: I believe that this information about multi-tasking is probably more
relevant to the original question about reading on screen vs. reading
a book. The best understanding we can get is not going to be in very
high-tech brain scans but in the phenomenological aspect of something
we call "attention." I know that I prefer to listen to music when I
read because were I to do anything more "attention-getting," I would
be distracted or lose my reading "attention" while the music is
pleasant, doesn't distract, and may mask minor ambient noises.
Now I realize that a great deal of this has to do with the way I was
"socialized." I was not raised in a multi-tasking milieu. I can
listen to the radio and drive, but I can't carry on a conversation,
listen to the radio and drive without losing something from all of
these functions. So the response is phenomenological and individual
to the person involved.
Reading from a screen specifically has its own set of problems. If
one is used to reading from print, the actual eye-movements across
the page are usually routinized because pages do not differ in
appearance too often from one another. I believe this assists both
speed and comprehension of the text. Type size can influence the
length of time to read and comprehend a given portion of
text. Reading on a screen means the eyes are scanning a different
line length, and often a different reading environment in terms of
whether the screen is one line of text after another or if other
items or "objects" are interspersed on the page of a screened text.
For instance, reading an item on a screen where there is an animated
ad next to the text can be very distracting. Incidentally, if it
takes too much of my attention away from the text and I actually
"see" the ad, my response is not what the advertiser was looking for
because I become quite resentful of the distraction. Similarly, when
reading newspaper text next to an ad usually doesn't distract from my
reading, and the ad generally goes unnoticed.
Since I do not read on dedicated electronic readers where there is
only text, I have no opinion about these new electronic readers. I
prefer the codex, but again, that is also attributable to my
"socialization." If someone learns to read on a screen during one's
formative years, there probably will be a more positive reading
result than someone who learns this new skill at a later age. Again,
this is difficult to test because people ordinarily read at different
rates of speed and levels of comprehension.
Professor I: I believe that this information about multi-tasking is probably more
relevant to the original question about reading on screen vs. reading
a book. The best understanding we can get is not going to be in very
high-tech brain scans but in the phenomenological aspect of something
we call "attention." I know that I prefer to listen to music when I
read because were I to do anything more "attention-getting," I would
be distracted or lose my reading "attention" while the music is
pleasant, doesn't distract, and may mask minor ambient noises.
Now I realize that a great deal of this has to do with the way I was
"socialized." I was not raised in a multi-tasking milieu. I can
listen to the radio and drive, but I can't carry on a conversation,
listen to the radio and drive without losing something from all of
these functions. So the response is phenomenological and individual
to the person involved.
Professor J: This is very much the old deep and slow versus the new fast and thin reading
that I ref in my new book! I think something is building.....
Professor K: I think the answer is inside us. How to live with any new technology is ultimately a philosophical question. Always has been, always will be. We need a new philosophy for living with digital devices. That's what my book wil really be about, when it is released next year.
Professor O: It does not take brain scans to detect the superficial grasp many
students are getting from reading eTexts, etc. Most of us, aside from
looking up "directory" items, hit the "print" key when we need to read
long excerpts and we do it for comprehension and speed, not the feel
of paper.
Very solid research exists by ***Charles Bigelow (type fonts) and
Gordon Legge ("Psychophysics of Reading in Normal and Low Vision").
To the children born in the future, we may ask them if they want a
100% read-on-paper life or a 70% read-on-screen life.
Blogger L: I've heard, Danny, about your campaign to try to coin a neologism to describe the behavior we undertake when we seek to decode and comprehend text displayed on computer screens. You're concerned that this behavior and its impact on brains is fundamentally different from "reading," and that neuroscientists may not be paying sufficient attention to this emergent phenomenon. As you say:
to search for a new word (if needed, and if useful!) is to point out the need for scholars and scientists to study the very real differences between reading on
paper and reading on screens, and not just with learned opinions and surveys, but with hard science -- that is to say, MRI brain scan studies in laboratory settings and hospital rooms to study -- firsthand! up close and personal! -- white matter and grey matter neural pathways and try to ascertain if reading on paper surfaces lights up different parts of the brain compared to reading on a screen.
Indeed there already is a great deal of interest among neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and educators in the neurology, the biology, of reading. Researchers are using MRI and other technologies, along with tried-and-true cognitive testing, to limn the circuits that reading forges and follows in the brain. And some of these researchers are turning their interest on the question of reading v. "screening," as Bloom says. A few links—
Jonah Lehrer, a friend of mine and a great science writer, covers this topic in a recent blog post (see his book Proust was a Neuroscientist for much more):
He cites a recent brain imaging study comparing brain pathways of "expert reading" to those of struggling readers:
There's the recent NYTimes piece polling various sorts of experts on the brain's receptivity to ebooks (which includes David Gelertner's short piece, which I link to in my reverse e-book post):
And Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, subtitled The Story of Science and the Reading Brain. Wolf (who also gets space in the Times feature linked to above) is especially concerned about the neural implications of the switch from paper to screens.
Of course to say "paper to screens" is a massive simplification of the transformation that's underway. The cognitive, cultural, and technological shift we're experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them ... every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It's nearly impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What's the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we've gone from "claying" to "papyring" to "velluming" to "papering" to "screening," our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where do we locate "reading" in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation itself represent the essence of "reading"?
New means of putting text together are also new ways of putting the brain together. But that neural plasticity is what we do as humans; that, in a word, is reading, whatever the media.
Professor W: I have no doubt that the new mediums [like E-Books] will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically.
For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).
Blogger Q: Like Dr Maryanne Wolf, I'm mildly concerned that we're slowly losing the talent for long-form immersion. I struggled through a Tolstoy epic a few months ago, and though I finished the book - after falling asleep to the same page for several weeks - I couldn't help but get frustrated at all the digressions and interruptions. I'm ashamed of my impatience, but in a world oversaturated with information I wonder if it's increasingly hard to savor the languid process of reading a really long book. Our attention is a scarce resource, and there's more competition for that resource than ever before.
That said, I don't worry too much about the effect of E-Books on the reading brain. I think one of the most interesting findings regarding literacy and the human cortex is the fact that there are actually two distinct pathways activated by the sight of letters. (The brain is stuffed full of redundancies.) As the lab of Stanislas Dehaene has found, when people are reading "routinized, familiar passages" a part of the brain known as the visual word form area (VWFA, or the ventral pathway) is activated. This pathway processes letters and words in parallel, allowing us to read quickly and effortlessly. It's the pathway that literate readers almost always rely upon.
But Dehaene and colleagues have also found a second reading pathway in the brain, which is activated when we're reading prose that is "unfamiliar". (The scientists trigger this effect in a variety of ways, such as rotating the letters, or using a hard to read font, or filling the prose with obscure words.) As expected, when the words were more degraded or unusual, subjects took longer to comprehend them. By studying this process in an fMRI machine, Dehaene could see why: reading text that was highly degraded or presented in an unusual fashion meant that we relied on a completely different neural route, known as the dorsal reading pathway. Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we learned how to read, Deheane's research demonstrates that even literate adults still rely, in some situations, on the same patterns of brain activity as a first-grader, carefully sounding out the syllables.
What does this have to do with E-Books? This research suggests that the act of reading observes a gradient of fluency. Familiar sentences printed in Helvetica activate the ventral route, while difficult prose filled with jargon and fancy words and printed in an illegible font require us to use the slow dorsal route. Here's my rampant speculation (and it's pure speculation because no one has brought a Kindle into a scanner): new reading formats (such as computer screens or E-Books) might initially require a bit more dorsal processing, as our visual cortex adjusts to the image. (One has to remember that printed books have been evolving to fit the peculiar sensory habits of the brain for hundreds of years - they're a pretty perfect cultural product.) But then, after a few years, the technology is tweaked and our brain adjusts and the new reading format is read with the same ventral fluency as words on a page.
The larger point is that most complaints about E-Books and Kindle apps boil down to a single problem: they don't feel as "effortless" or "automatic" as old-fashioned books. But here's the wonderful thing about the human brain: give it a little time and practice and it can make just about anything automatic. We excel at developing new habits. Before long, digital ink will feel just as easy as actual ink.
posted by dan at 8:52 AM
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