Ferris Jabr,
The Reading Brain in the Digital Age
(2013)
Originally
published at Scientific
American.
Some highlights from Jabr's article (below):
{1} E-readers and tablets are becoming more popular as such technologies improve, but research suggests that reading on paper still boasts unique advantages. . . .
{2} We often think of reading as a cerebral activity concerned with the abstract -- with thoughts and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of the physical world we inhabit. . . . When we read, we construct a mental representation of the text in which meaning is anchored to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains unclear, but they are likely similar to the mental maps we create of terrain -- such as mountains and trails -- and of man-made physical spaces, such as apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in published studies, people report that when trying to locate a particular piece of written information they often remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one of the earlier chapters.
{3} In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two clearly defined domains -- the left and right pages -- and a total of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is like leaving one footprint after another on the trail -- there's a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a coherent mental map of the text.
{4} In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words, tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to immediately locate a particular phrase -- but it is difficult to see any one passage in the context of the entire text. . . .
{5} An emerging collection of studies emphasizes that . . . people do not always bring as much mental effort to screens in the first place. Subconsciously, many people may think of reading on a computer or tablet as a less serious affair than reading on paper. Based on a detailed 2005 survey of 113 people in northern California, Ziming Liu of San Jose State University concluded that people reading on screens take a lot of shortcuts -- they spend more time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared with people reading on paper, and are more likely to read a document once, and only once.
{6} When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage in . . . strategies such as setting specific goals, rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has understood along the way. In a 2011 experiment at the Technion--Israel Institute of Technology, college students took multiple-choice exams about expository texts either on computers or on paper. Researchers limited half the volunteers to a meager seven minutes of study time; the other half could review the text for as long as they liked. When under pressure to read quickly, students using computers and paper performed equally well. When managing their own study time, however, volunteers using paper scored about 10 percentage points higher.
E-readers and tablets are becoming more popular as such
technologies improve, but research suggests that reading on
paper still boasts unique advantages.
In a
viral YouTube video from October 2011 a one-year-old
girl sweeps her fingers across an iPad's touchscreen,
shuffling groups of icons. In the following scenes she appears
to pinch, swipe and prod the pages of paper magazines as
though they too were screens. When nothing happens, she pushes
against her leg, confirming that her finger works just fine—or
so a title card would have us believe.
The girl's father, Jean-Louis
Constanza, presents "A Magazine Is an iPad That Does Not
Work" as naturalistic observation—a Jane Goodall among the
chimps moment—that reveals a generational transition.
"Technology codes our minds," he writes in the video's
description. "Magazines are now useless and impossible to
understand, for digital natives"—that is, for people who have
been interacting with digital technologies from a very early
age.
Perhaps his daughter really did expect the paper magazines to
respond the same way an iPad would. Or maybe she had no
expectations at all—maybe she just wanted to touch the
magazines. Babies
touch everything. Young children who have never seen a
tablet like the iPad or an e-reader like the Kindle will still
reach out and run their fingers across the pages of a
paper book; they will jab at an illustration they like; heck,
they will even taste the corner of a book. Today's so-called digital natives
still interact with a mix of paper magazines and books, as
well as tablets, smartphones and e-readers; using one kind of
technology does not preclude them from understanding another.
Nevertheless, the video brings into focus an important
question: How exactly does the technology we use to read
change the way we read? How reading on screens differs from
reading on paper is relevant not just to the youngest
among us, but to just about everyone who reads—to anyone
who routinely switches between working long hours in front of
a computer at the office and leisurely reading paper magazines
and books at home; to people who have embraced e-readers for
their convenience and portability, but admit that for some
reason they still prefer reading on paper; and to those who
have already vowed
to forgo tree pulp entirely. As digital texts and
technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more
mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively
and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to
onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried
about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the
validity of such concerns paper-thin?
Since at least the 1980s researchers in many different
fields—including psychology, computer engineering, and library
and information science—have investigated such questions in
more than one hundred published studies. The matter is by no
means settled. Before 1992 most
studies concluded that people read slower, less
accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper.
Studies published
since the early 1990s, however, have produced more
inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier
conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant
differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper
and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most
people still prefer paper—especially when reading
intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading
technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun
becomes more common. In the U.S., e-books currently make up between
15 and 20
percent of all trade book sales.
Even so, evidence from laboratory
experiments, polls and consumer
reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail
to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading
on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent
people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and
satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may
subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper,
screens may also drain more of our mental
resources while we are reading and make it a little
harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel
line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward
different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many
people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind
less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.
Navigating textual landscapes
Understanding how reading on paper is different from reading
on screens requires some explanation of how the brain
interprets written language. We often think of reading as a
cerebral activity concerned with the abstract—with thoughts
and ideas, tone and themes, metaphors and motifs. As far as
our brains are concerned, however, text is a tangible part of
the physical world we inhabit. In fact, the brain essentially
regards letters as physical objects because it does not really
have another way of understanding them. As Wolf explains in
her book Proust and the Squid, we are not born with
brain circuits dedicated to reading. After all, we did not
invent writing until relatively recently in our evolutionary
history, around the fourth millennium B.C. So the human brain
improvises a brand-new circuit for reading by weaving together
various regions of neural tissue devoted to other abilities,
such as spoken language, motor coordination and vision.
Some of these repurposed brain regions are specialized for object
recognition—they are networks of neurons that help us
instantly distinguish an apple from an orange, for example,
yet classify both as fruit. Just as we learn that certain
features—roundness, a twiggy stem, smooth skin—characterize an
apple, we learn to recognize each letter by its particular
arrangement of lines, curves and hollow spaces. Some of the
earliest forms of writing, such as Sumerian
cuneiform, began as characters shaped
like the objects they represented—a person's head, an
ear of barley, a fish. Some researchers see traces of these
origins in modern alphabets: C as crescent moon, S as snake.
Especially intricate characters—such as Chinese hanzi
and Japanese kanji—activate
motor regions in the brain involved in forming those
characters on paper: The brain literally goes through the
motions of writing when reading, even if the hands are empty.
Researchers recently
discovered that the same thing happens in a milder way
when some people read cursive.
Beyond treating individual letters as physical objects, the
human brain may also perceive a text in its entirety as a kind
of physical landscape. When we read, we construct a mental
representation of the text in which meaning is anchored
to structure. The exact nature of such representations remains
unclear, but they are likely
similar to the mental maps we create of terrain—such as
mountains and trails—and of man-made physical spaces, such as
apartments and offices. Both anecdotally and in
published studies, people report that when trying to
locate a particular piece of written information they often
remember where in the text it appeared. We might recall that
we passed the red farmhouse near the start of the trail before
we started climbing uphill through the forest; in a similar
way, we remember that we read about Mr. Darcy rebuffing
Elizabeth Bennett on the bottom of the left-hand page in one
of the earlier chapters.
In most cases, paper books have more obvious topography than
onscreen text. An open paperback presents a reader with two
clearly defined domains—the left and right pages—and a total
of eight corners with which to orient oneself. A reader can
focus on a single page of a paper book without losing sight of
the whole text: one can see where the book begins and ends and
where one page is in relation to those borders. One can even
feel the thickness of the pages read in one hand and pages to
be read in the other. Turning the pages of a paper book is
like leaving one footprint after another on the trail—there's
a rhythm to it and a visible record of how far one has
traveled. All these features not only make text in a paper
book easily navigable, they also make it easier to form a
coherent mental map of the text.
In contrast, most screens, e-readers, smartphones and tablets
interfere with intuitive navigation of a text and inhibit
people from mapping the journey in their minds. A reader of
digital text might scroll through a seamless stream of words,
tap forward one page at a time or use the search function to
immediately locate a particular phrase—but it is difficult to
see any one passage in the context of the entire text. As an
analogy, imagine if Google Maps allowed people to navigate
street by individual street, as well as to teleport to any
specific address, but prevented them from zooming out to see a
neighborhood, state or country. Although e-readers like the
Kindle and tablets like the iPad re-create
pagination—sometimes complete with page numbers, headers and
illustrations—the screen only displays a single virtual page:
it is there and then it is gone. Instead of hiking the trail
yourself, the trees, rocks and moss move past you in flashes
with no trace of what came before and no way to see what lies
ahead.
"The implicit feel of where you are in a physical book turns
out to be more important than we realized," says Abigail
Sellen of Microsoft Research Cambridge in England and
co-author of The Myth of the Paperless Office. "Only
when you get an e-book do you start to miss it. I don't think
e-book manufacturers have thought enough about how you might
visualize where you are in a book."
At least a few studies suggest that by limiting the way people
navigate texts, screens impair comprehension. In a
study published in January 2013 Anne
Mangen of the University of Stavanger in Norway and her
colleagues asked 72 10th-grade students of similar reading
ability to study one narrative and one expository text, each
about 1,500 words in length. Half the students read the texts
on paper and half read them in pdf files on computers with
15-inch liquid-crystal display (LCD) monitors. Afterward,
students completed reading-comprehension tests consisting of
multiple-choice and short-answer questions, during which they
had access to the texts. Students who read the texts on
computers performed a little worse than students who read on
paper.
Based on observations during the study, Mangen thinks that
students reading pdf files had a more difficult time finding
particular information when referencing the texts. Volunteers
on computers could only scroll or click through the pdfs one
section at a time, whereas students reading on paper could
hold the text in its entirety in their hands and quickly
switch between different pages. Because of their easy
navigability, paper books and documents may be better suited
to absorption in a text. "The ease with which you can find out
the beginning, end and everything inbetween and the constant
connection to your path, your progress in the text, might be
some way of making it less taxing cognitively, so you have
more free capacity for comprehension," Mangen says.
Supporting this research, surveys
indicate that screens and e-readers interfere with two
other important aspects of navigating texts: serendipity and a
sense of control. People report
that they enjoy flipping to a previous section of a paper book
when a sentence surfaces a memory of something they read
earlier, for example, or quickly scanning ahead on a whim.
People also like to have as much control over a text as
possible—to highlight with chemical ink, easily write notes to
themselves in the margins as well as deform the paper however
they choose.
Because of these preferences—and because getting away from
multipurpose screens improves concentration—people
consistently say that when they really want to dive into a
text, they read it on paper. In a
2011 survey of graduate students at National Taiwan
University, the majority reported browsing a few paragraphs
online before printing out the whole text for more in-depth
reading. A
2008 survey of millennials (people born between 1980 and
the early 2000s) at Salve Regina University in Rhode Island
concluded that, "when it comes to reading a book, even they
prefer good, old-fashioned print". And in a
2003 study conducted at the National Autonomous
University of Mexico, nearly 80 percent of 687 surveyed
students preferred to read text on paper as opposed to on a
screen in order to "understand it with clarity".
Surveys and consumer reports also suggest that the sensory
experiences typically associated with reading—especially
tactile experiences—matter to people more than one might
assume. Text on a computer, an e-reader and—somewhat
ironically—on any touch-screen device is far more intangible
than text on paper. Whereas a paper book is made from pages of
printed letters fixed in a particular arrangement, the text
that appears on a screen is not part of the device's
hardware—it is an ephemeral image. When reading a paper book,
one can feel the paper and ink and smooth or fold a page with
one's fingers; the pages make a distinctive sound when turned;
and underlining or highlighting a sentence with ink
permanently alters the paper's chemistry. So far, digital
texts have not satisfyingly replicated this kind of tactility
(although some companies are innovating, at
least with keyboards).
Paper books also have an immediately discernible size, shape
and weight. We might refer to a hardcover edition of War
and Peace as a hefty tome or a paperback Heart of
Darkness as a slim volume. In contrast, although a
digital text has a length—which is sometimes represented with
a scroll or progress bar—it has no obvious shape or thickness.
An e-reader always weighs the same, regardless of whether you
are reading Proust's magnum opus or one of Hemingway's short
stories. Some researchers have found that these discrepancies
create enough "haptic
dissonance" to dissuade some people from using
e-readers. People expect books to look, feel and even smell a
certain way; when they do not, reading sometimes becomes less
enjoyable or even unpleasant. For others, the convenience of a
slim portable e-reader outweighs any attachment they might
have to the feel of paper books.
Exhaustive reading
Although many old and recent studies conclude that people
understand what they read on paper more thoroughly than what
they read on screens, the differences are often small. Some
experiments, however, suggest that researchers should look not
just at immediate reading comprehension, but also at long-term
memory. In a
2003 study Kate
Garland of the University of Leicester and her
colleagues asked 50 British college students to read study
material from an introductory economics course either on a
computer monitor or in a spiral-bound booklet. After 20
minutes of reading Garland and her colleagues quizzed the
students with multiple-choice questions. Students scored
equally well regardless of the medium, but differed in how
they remembered the information.
Psychologists distinguish between remembering something—which
is to recall a piece of information along with contextual
details, such as where, when and how one learned it—and
knowing something, which is feeling that something is true
without remembering how one learned the information.
Generally, remembering is a weaker form of memory that is
likely to fade unless it is converted into more stable,
long-term memory that is "known" from then on. When taking the
quiz, volunteers who had read study material on a monitor
relied much more on remembering than on knowing, whereas
students who read on paper depended equally on remembering and
knowing. Garland and her colleagues think that students who
read on paper learned the study material more thoroughly more
quickly; they did not have to spend a lot of time searching
their minds for information from the text, trying to trigger
the right memory—they often just knew the answers.
Other researchers have suggested that people comprehend less
when they read on a screen because screen-based reading is more
physically and mentally taxing than reading on paper.
E-ink is easy on the eyes because it reflects ambient light
just like a paper book, but computer screens, smartphones and
tablets like the iPad shine light directly into people's
faces. Depending on the model of the device, glare, pixilation
and flickers can also tire the eyes. LCDs are certainly
gentler on eyes than their predecessor, cathode-ray tubes
(CRT), but prolonged reading on glossy self-illuminated
screens can cause eyestrain, headaches and blurred vision.
Such symptoms are so common among people who read on
screens—affecting around 70 percent of people who work long
hours in front of computers—that the American Optometric
Association officially
recognizes computer
vision syndrome.
Erik
Wästlund of Karlstad University in Sweden has conducted
some particularly rigorous research on whether paper or
screens demand more physical and cognitive resources. In one of his
experiments 72 volunteers completed the Higher Education
Entrance Examination READ test—a 30-minute, Swedish-language
reading-comprehension exam consisting of multiple-choice
questions about five texts averaging 1,000 words each. People
who took the test on a computer scored lower and reported
higher levels of stress
and tiredness than people who completed it on paper.
In another
set of experiments 82 volunteers completed the READ test
on computers, either as a paginated document or as a
continuous piece of text. Afterward researchers assessed the
students' attention and working memory, which is a collection
of mental talents that allow people to temporarily store and
manipulate information in their minds. Volunteers had to
quickly close a series of pop-up windows, for example, sort
virtual cards or remember digits that flashed on a screen.
Like many cognitive abilities, working memory is a finite
resource that diminishes with exertion.
Although people in both groups performed equally well on the
READ test, those who had to scroll through the continuous text
did not do as well on the attention and working-memory tests.
Wästlund thinks that scrolling—which requires a reader to
consciously focus on both the text and how they are moving
it—drains more mental resources than turning or clicking a
page, which are simpler and more automatic gestures. A 2004
study conducted at the University of Central Florida
reached similar conclusions.
Attitude adjustments
An emerging collection of studies emphasizes that in addition
to screens possibly taxing people's attention more than paper,
people do not always bring as much mental effort to screens in
the first place. Subconsciously, many people may think of
reading on a computer or tablet as a less serious affair than
reading on paper. Based on a detailed 2005 survey of 113
people in northern California, Ziming
Liu of San Jose State University concluded that people
reading on screens take a lot of shortcuts—they spend more
time browsing, scanning and hunting for keywords compared with
people reading on paper, and are more likely to read a
document once, and only once.
When reading on screens, people seem less inclined to engage
in what psychologists call metacognitive learning
regulation—strategies such as setting specific goals,
rereading difficult sections and checking how much one has
understood along the way. In a 2011
experiment at the Technion–Israel Institute of
Technology, college students took multiple-choice exams about
expository texts either on computers or on paper. Researchers
limited half the volunteers to a meager seven minutes of study
time; the other half could review the text for as long as they
liked. When under pressure to read quickly, students using
computers and paper performed equally well. When managing
their own study time, however, volunteers using paper scored
about 10 percentage points higher. Presumably, students using
paper approached the exam with a more studious frame of mind
than their screen-reading peers, and more effectively directed
their attention and working memory.
Perhaps, then, any discrepancies in reading comprehension
between paper and screens will shrink as people's attitudes
continue to change. The star of "A Magazine Is an iPad That
Does Not Work" is three-and-a-half years old today and no
longer interacts with paper magazines as though they were
touchscreens, her father says. Perhaps she and her peers will
grow up without the subtle bias against screens that seems to
lurk in the minds of older generations. In current research
for Microsoft, Sellen has learned that many people do not feel
much ownership of e-books because of their impermanence and
intangibility: "They think of using an e-book, not owning an
e-book," she says. Participants in her studies say that when
they really like an electronic book, they go out and get the
paper version. This reminds Sellen of people's early opinions
of digital music, which she has also studied. Despite initial
resistance, people love curating, organizing and sharing
digital music today. Attitudes toward e-books may transition
in a similar way, especially if e-readers and tablets allow
more sharing and social interaction than they currently do.
Books on the Kindle can only
be loaned once, for example.
To date, many engineers, designers and user-interface experts
have worked hard to make reading on an e-reader or tablet as
close to reading on paper as possible. E-ink resembles
chemical ink and the simple layout of the Kindle's screen
looks like a page in a paperback. Likewise, Apple's iBooks
attempts to simulate the overall aesthetic of paper books,
including somewhat realistic page-turning. Jaejeung Kim of
KAIST Institute of Information Technology Convergence in South
Korea and his colleagues have designed an innovative
and unreleased interface that makes iBooks seem
primitive. When using their interface, one can see the many
individual pages one has read on the left side of the tablet
and all the unread pages on the right side, as if holding a
paperback in one's hands. A reader can also flip bundles of
pages at a time with a flick of a finger.
But why, one could ask, are we working so hard to make reading
with new technologies like tablets and e-readers so similar to
the experience of reading on the very ancient technology that
is paper? Why not keep paper and evolve screen-based reading
into something else entirely? Screens obviously offer readers
experiences that paper cannot. Scrolling may not be the ideal
way to navigate a text as long and dense as Moby Dick,
but the New York Times, Washington Post, ESPN
and other media outlets have created beautiful, highly visual
articles that depend
entirely on scrolling and could not appear in print in
the same way. Some Web comics
and infographics
turn scrolling into a strength rather than a weakness.
Similarly, Robin Sloan
has pioneered the
tap essay for mobile devices. The immensely popular
interactive Scale of
the Universe tool could not have been made on paper in
any practical way. New e-publishing companies like Atavist offer tablet
readers long-form journalism with embedded interactive
graphics, maps, timelines, animations and sound tracks. And
some writers are pairing up with computer programmers to
produce ever
more sophisticated interactive fiction
and nonfiction
in which one's choices determine what one reads, hears and
sees next.
When it comes to intensively reading long pieces of plain
text, paper and ink may still have the advantage. But text is
not the only way to read.
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