Attention (2): Maryanne Wolf and cognitive patience
A series of essays on Attention:
It is very likely that those of us who are English teachers share the same origin. Back in childhood we probably had the same experience: frequently we were to be seen completely lost in a book, oblivious to everything around us (including our parents calling us to dinner), unwilling to drag ourselves out of that blissful state to attend to the mere realities of everyday existence. This was the first, pure, Edenic experience of reading to ourselves.
Of course, many people have this experience and most don’t go on to be English teachers. Equally, many children are not ‘readers’ in any sense, and grow up to be adults who read rarely or at all. Still, there is much agreement that the contemporary world is increasingly challenging for those of us who wish our own children and our pupils to experience such bliss.
The cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has a word for this experience: it is, simply, ‘home.’ Reader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world (2018) is an elegant and insightful analysis of how deep reading is under threat, and of how this particular form of attention is being eroded by the digital universe in which we now live. For an English teacher, the book is essential reading. For me, it is one of the most important books of recent years.
Wolf starts with ‘a deceptively simple fact’: Human beings were never born to read. Indeed, no other animal species has learned to read. Because reading is only about 6,000 years old, and is not naturally learned, the implication is clear: our brains can be, as it were, re-re-wired. They were re-wired to allow us to read in the first place, and the instrinsic plasticity of our reading brains holds within itself its own degradation. Wolf is alarmed: in Letters 5 to 8 of this book, she calls herself a reading warrior for the world’s future children:-
You need only examine yourself. Perhaps you have already noticed how the quality of your attention has changed the more you read on screens and on digital devices. Perhaps you have felt a pang of something subtle that is missing when you seek to immerse yourself in a favourite book. Like a phantom limb, you remember who you were as a reader, but cannot summon that ‘attentive ghost’ with the joy you once felt in being transported somewhere outside the self to that interior space. It is more difficult still with children, whose attention is continuously distracted and flooded by stimuli that will never be consolidated in their reservoirs of knowledge.
Attention is at the heart of this. In Letter Two, ‘Under the Big Top’ (she uses the analogy of a circus), which looks at the extraordinary neuroscience behind reading, Wolf states:
The brain’s attentional systems are the equivalent of biological spotlights: unless the lights are turned on, nothing else can happen. But note that there are different kinds of spotlight: this is because the brain needs to be able to allocate different forms of attention to each of the many steps or processes involved in reading. What few people ever appreciate is how central attention is for every function that we perform and that multiple forms of attention go into action before our eyes even see the word [on the page].
Then, in Letter Three, Wolf asks the central question in the book: ‘Deep Reading: is it endangered?’
It is the nature of attention … that underlies large, unanswered questions that society is beginning to confront. Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focussing of our attention?
She is deeply concerned about everything we will lose if we let slip what she calls the cognitive patience we gain when we immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books. She cites the remarkable conversation between Marilynne Robinson and Barack Obama in which the then President called Robinson a specialist in empathy, another word for the kind of attention to other human beings that can help us become responsible citizens and create better societies:
The consistent strengthening of the connections among our analogical, inferential, empathic, and background knowledge processes generalises well beyond reading. When we learn to connect these processes over and over in our reading, it becomes easier to apply them to our own lives, teasing apart our motives and intentions and understanding with ever greater perspicacity and, perhaps, wisdom, why others think and feel the way they do.
As the book continues, Wolf expresses with increasing forcefulness what is by now a common anxiety: that digital devices are challenging all of us (certainly not just children) in entirely new ways, as we are bombarded
constantly with new stimuli, as we splice our attention across multiple digital devices… As a society, we are continuously distracted by our environment, and our very wiring as hominids aids and abets this. We do not see or hear with the same quality of attention, because we see and hear too much, become habituated, and then seek still more.
(This is a central thesis of The Distracted Mind: ancient brains in a high-tech world, by Adam Gazzaley and Larry D. Rosen, which will feature in another piece in this series).
If you teach, or are the parent of, teenagers, you are all too aware of this.
In her comments on working memory, Wolf refers to Socrates, who worried about written language being a recipe for forgetting, and comments:
Our culture’s recipe would not be so much for forgetting, but for never remembering the same way in the first place: first because we are splitting our attention too much for our working memory to function optimally; and second, because we assume that in a digital world, we do not need to remember in the ways we remembered in the past.
The latter echoes the tedious idea that schools are teaching in an out-of-date way because ‘you can just Google it’ (see Myth 4 in Daisy Christodoulou’s book Seven Myths About Education).
As Wolf goes on to write beautifully, in a sentence as good as any in the book:
The digital chain that leads from the proliferation of information to the gruel-thin, eye-byte servings consumed daily by many of us will need more than societal vigilance, lest the quality of our attention and memory, the perception of beauty and recognition of truth, and the complex decision-making capacities based on all of these atrophy along the way.
Importantly, she makes the point that this protest by a reader-worrier is not elitist: in fact, it is reading, education and knowledge which are the best hopes for those not in elites.
In Chapter 5, ‘The Raising of Children in a Digital Age,’ Wolf hits the most sensitive target for teachers and parents. There is a parallel here in the issue of climate change: how responsible are we being? Think of the memorable statement of Jonas Salk: Our greatest responsibility is to be good ancestors. What legacy are we leaving for future generations? (It’s hard to imagine a Greta Thunberg-figure stirring the world about reading).
Pages 108 to 127 examine ‘Attention and Memory in the Age of Distraction’, ‘Memory in a Grasshopper Mind’ and ‘Our Children’s Internalized Knowledge’, and conclude with a section asking ‘Will Altered Cognition Alter Deep Reading and Deeper Thinking?’ There is so much important thinking here, and a brilliantly cogent explanation of working memory for those unfamiliar with it. Just read the pages: I will have to make do with one vivid simile:
Switching between sources of attention for the child’s brain makes the perfect biological-cultural storm for adults look like a gentle downpour.
Wolf looks at the vital first five formative years, and points out that
one of the most salient influences on young children’s attention involves the shared gaze that occurs and develops while parents read to them.
This is an idea that is expanded on in Meghan Cox Gurdon’s book The Enchanted Hour: the miraculous power of reading aloud in the age of distraction (2019), which I will write about soon. Wolf refers to Charles Taylor’s point that The crucial condition for human language learning is joint attention (and this of course should find its anchor in paper rather than digital pages).
What can we do in schools? Wolf wishes that there were a movement for the protection of lost time, when little children are not exposed to whatever captures their attention. As they become older this becomes almost impossible, though perhaps we can be optimistic and say there are at least initial signs of recognition that such attention-hoovers are damaging both to family life and schooling. After all, once upon a time doctors recommended nicotine-smoking. Wolf tries to be positive in the latter part of the book, and Letter Eight is called ‘Building a Biliterate Brain’: she hopes young people can become expert, flexible code switchers between print and digital media, just as they can naturally be bilingual. Her ideas on resourcing, researching and training deserve attention, but she may well be overly-optimistic.
In the final chapter, Wolf uses the Latin phrase: Festina lente (‘make haste slowly’- later in this series I will look at Thomas Newkirk’s ideas on slow reading), and hopes children can learn the capacity for cognitive patience. Virtually everyone feels everything is getting faster, and our ability to attend in any depth to anything (including each other) is being thinned out.
Reader, Come Home is one of the most eloquent examinations of these new challenges yet written. To finish: in the middle of the book, Wolf quotes ‘a very simple, very beautiful Native American story’ about (yes) wolves:
A grandfather is telling his young grandson about life. He tells the little boy that in every person there are two wolves, who live in one’s breast and are always at war with each other. The first wolf is very aggressive and full of violence and hate towards the world. The second wolf is peaceful and full of light and love. The little boy anxiously asks his grandfather which wolf wins. The grandfather replies, ‘The one you feed.’
[END]
UPDATE, March 13th: a treat - you can now watch Maryanne Wolf’s Montag Lecture -
Further:
The book’s page on Wolf’s own site, with lots of links to reviews and articles.
C-Span at the Harvard Book Store: an hour with Maryanne Wolf.
Doug Lemov’s review in Education Next: ‘It is true that schools are one of the few places that could ensure time and space for deep reading, sustained and meditative. But this would require a changed vision: school as a place apart as much as a place connected.’
The Atlanta Speech School has a virtual book study group with video messages from the author and their own discussions of the chapters
Next in the series: 3. Meghan Cox Gurdon’s The Enchanted Hour: the miraculous power of reading aloud in the age of distraction.