Support de l'intervention de Marianne Wolf lors de la 1ère session des Entretiens du Nouveau Monde Industriel 2012.

1. The Changing Reading Brain of the
21st Century: The Importance of “Knowing what
we do not Know” for the Future of How We Think
The Importance of “Knowing what we do not Know”

2. Center for Reading
and Language Research
• Maryanne Wolf, Director • Mirit Barzillai, Semantics, Global
• Stephanie Gottwald, Asst. Literacy, Technology
Director, Linguistics, Teacher • Elizabeth Norton, Brain Imaging
Training
in Early Predictors of Dyslexia
• Yashira Perez, Genes,
Dyslexia, African-American & • Kate Ullman, African-American
Latino children Dialect and Reading
• Cathy Moritz, Music and
• Surina Basho, Memory and
Reading
Dyslexia Subtypes
• Yvonne Gill (Arizona) and
Lynne Miller, Curriculum • Melissa Orkin, Affective
Development for RAVE-O Development and Dyslexia
Basic and Plus

3. I am deeply indebted to...
Heidi Bally
Cinthia Coletti Haan
Ulrike Kesper-Grossman and Paul Grossman
Rossella and Aurelio Maria Mottola

4. Great transitions in
Communication
1
Non- language to
Oral Language
2
Oral Language to
Written Language
3
Written Language
to
Digital Culture

5. Three Questions of Kant (Dunne,
2012)
What can we know?
What should we do?
What may we hope?

6. 1. Can what we know about the
evolution of the reading brain
inform the future, digital culture?
2. Can what we know about the
What can we reading brain illumine what we do not
Know from know about how reading and thought will
develop in the next generation ?
Neurosciences
? 3. Can knowledge about the “reading
brain”, combined with multiple ways
of knowing ---exemplified by Socrates,
Proust, and Nicholas of Cusa--- propel a
more hopeful approach to our transition?

7. 1. Can what we know about the evolution of the
reading brain inform the future, digital culture ?

8. An Approach to the Study of Reading
from Cognitive Neurosciences
from Cognitive Neurosciences

9. The human brain was never born to read.
How did the human brain learn to read with
no genetic program or specific reading
center?

10. Dehaene, 2009
“Neuronal Recycling” for Literacy

11. Principles of Brain Design
Underpinning Cultural Inventions
• Ability to form new
connected circuits
• Capacity for “working
groups” of neurons to
specialize (pattern
recognition)
• Capacity for Two Pyramidals,Greg Dunn
automatization

12. “Neuronal Niche” (Dehaene,2009)
For First Logographic Symbols
Y

13. Evidence for Neuronal Recycling and Possibly Proto-letters
Dehaene’s Studies of
Numeracy in Primates
Studies of Baboons and
Orthographic Learning
Grainger et al.
New Studies of Non-
Literate Children in
Ethiopia-Tufts and MIT Media Lab

16. Earlier Tablets: Sumerian
Earliest
emphases on
phonology,
orthography,
semantics,
syntax, and
morphology
(Cohen, 2000)

17. Greek Writing and the
Alphabetic Principle
The insight that words
are made up of
sounds and each
sound can be signified
by a symbol .

18. Multiple Circuits of Reading Brain
English
Brain can
rearrange itself
in multiple
Chinese ways to read,
& Kanji depending on
writing system
Japanese and medium.
Bulger, Perfetti, & Schneider
Kana

19. How does the Young Brain
Learn to Read?
Each new reader must
create a new reading
circuit from older
cognitive and
linguistic
structures and their
connections

20. Martinos MIT
Imaging Center

21. Early Reading Brain:
Everything Matters in the Development of the
Reading Circuit

22. P honemes
O rthographic
Patterns
S emantics
S yntax
M orphology
Particularly, Language
Development

24. Expert Deep Reading” Brain on
Proust

25. The Heart of
Expert Reading
Expert Reading
At the heart of
reading,100 to 200
milliseconds allow us
“time to think
new thoughts”.

26. “We feel quite truly that
our wisdom begins with
that of the author…By a
law which perhaps
signifies that we can
receive the truth from
nobody, that which is the
end of their wisdom
appears to us as but the
beginning of ours.”
“Nous sentons Marcel Proust
tres bien que
notre sagesse
commence ou
celle de l’auteur
finit... “

27. “Deep Reading”
“Slower”,
concentrated
cognitive processes
encouraged in
present
expert reading
brain

28. Inference
Analogical
Thinking
Critical Analysis
and Deliberation
Insight and
Epiphany
Contemplation
Going beyond the
wisdom of the author

29. 2. Can what we know about the Reading Brain
illumine what we do not know about how reading
and thought will develop in a digital culture ?

30. What are the deeper implications of having a
plastic reading circuit as we move to a
digitally dominated set of mediums ?

31. How do we think on-line?
“The scariest thing about Stanley Kubrick’s vision
wasn’t that computers started to act like people
but that people had started to act like computers.
We’re beginning to process information as if we’re
nodes; it’s all about the speed of locating and
reading data.
We’re transferring our intelligence into the machine,
and the machine is transferring its way of thinking
into us.”
Nick Carr in “Do you trust Google?”,
WIRED, Jan. 2008

32. Cognitive
characteristics of
on-line reading
in the digital
reading brain
Continuous partial attention; less sustained
attention and focus
“Set” for immediacy and speed of processing
Faster multi-tasking of large sets of information
37

33. Differences in Attention: “Skimming is the new
normal”
Scanning, browsing, bouncing, keyword spotting (Liu,
2005, 2009)
Less time on in-depth, concentrated reading
Psychological reflex to “click” and move “set”
Decreased sustained attention

34. More attention to
visual, external imagery
Less emphases on
touch and materiality
Less internalization of
knowledge, and more
dependence on external
sources

35. Cognitive Effects of Multi-tasking:
Brain Imaging Studies
Brain Imaging Studies
“Even if we can learn while distracted,
it changes how you learn, making
the learning less efficient and useful”
“Multitasking hinders learning”
Russ Poldrack (2006)
Proceedings from National Academy of Science

36. Touch and Materiality Factors:
Kinesthesia and Synesthesia Emphases in
Screen and Print
“Near impossibility of getting immersed in
hypertext in same way as getting lost in a book”
(Mangen, 2009)

37. Comprehension for On-Screen vs. Print
Screen
Print
(Ackerman & Lauterman, 2012)

38. The Formation of Deep ReadingHow
does deep reading come to be?

39. Cautions From the Last Transition
Socrates feared that print
would give the illusion of
truth and create no ambition
in the young beyond the
superfluity of
knowledge .

40. Is superfluity (“shallow reading”)
and the expectation for constant,
immediate external information be
the new threat for digital readers?
Will these emphases short-circuit
the reading brain?

41. Will the process of internalization of knowledge
require too much time and cognitive effort given immediate
access to external knowledge
Will imagination in childhood be displaced by too much
that is given too quickly requiring too little
effort ?
Will the development of imagery in the child be
displaced by visual imagery that is provided

42. We can not go back to a
pre-digital time; but, we
should not lurch forward
without understanding
what we will lose ,
what we will gain , for
our species’ cognitive
repertoire.

43. “It would be a shame if brilliant technology
were to end up threatening the kind of
intellect that produced it.”
- Edward Tenner

44. Three Questions of Kant (Dunne,
2012)
What can we know?
What should we do?
What may we hope ?

45. 3. Can knowledge about the “reading brain”, combined with
multiple ways of knowing ---exemplified by
Socrates/Aristotle, Proust, and Nicholas of Cusa--- propel a
more hopeful approach to our transition?

46. How do we prevent “Short
circuiting” of deep reading brain
while acquiring new skills
necessary for the 21st
Century?

47. “A culture can be judged by how it
pursues three lives: the life of
activity and productivity, the life of
enjoyment, the life of
contemplation.”
-Aristotle

48. ➡ Massive information
processing with more
non-linear branching
and iconic emphases
Advantages of
Digital Reading ➡ Speed and efficiency
Brain for the Life
➡ Multi-tasking and
of Activity and interactive communication
Productivity
➡ Democratization of
knowledge

49. One of the greatest
impediments to this
form of reading is the
“busy mind” that
skips from one thought
to the next without the
capacity to enter the
hidden depths of words
that require both
receptivity and the
quiet focusing of
attention.
-Enzo Bianchi

50. Advantages of Deep
Reading Brain for the
“Life of
Contemplation”The time
required by deep reading
both in milliseconds
during the reading act
and in years of formation
changes the quality of
thought.

51. “We transgress not
because we try to build
the new, but because
we do not allow
ourselves to consider
what it disrupts or
diminishes”
-Sherry Turkle, Alone
Together

52. How do we resolve a “coincidence of opposites of
believable truths”?
-Nicholas of Cusa

53. “learn-ed ignorance”A kind of knowing that is
aware of its own limits:
what we know
what we do not know
and what we need to know to understand and move
forward.
to understand and move forward.

54. What we know...

55. We know...
... our brain was never genetically programmed to read.

56. We know...
... each reader must build a new reading circuit.

57. We know...
... this reading circuit is plastic and influenced by the
specific emphases of different writing systems and
mediums

58. We know...
... that the present reading brain is capable of both
the most superficial and the deepest forms of
reading, feeling, and thought

59. What we do not know...

60. We do not know...
... but we can predict that information will accelerate at
rates that will make completely new demands on every
person in the next generation.
Courtesy of Ray Kurzweil and Kurzweil Technologies, Inc.

61. We do not know...
...if immediate access to massive amounts of information
will change the nature of internal processing during
reading--- its deeper comprehension and the
internalization of knowledge for future thoughts and
insights beyond information given.

62. We do not know...
... if the immediate access to this increasing amount of
external information in the young will deter from the
formation of “Deep Reading” processes or the
desire to probe more deeply into its meaning or to go
beyond it.

63. We do not know...
... if such changes in internalized knowledge will result in
a very different set of cognitive capacities to synthesize,
infer from information, and go beyond it in very different,
and more innovative ways than before, more appropriate
for the digital culture.

64. Three Questions of Kant (Dunne,
2012)
What can we know?
What should we do?
What may we hope ?

65. “I think there’s a
common point between
both worlds, and then
there’s also a point of
departure where they
each demonstrate their
own sort of
possibilities.”
-Mark Danielewski

67. QuickTime™ et un
décompresseur
sont requis pour visionner cette image.

68. How do we add to the
repertoire of the expert
“Knowing what we reading brain without
do not Know” diminishing its present
capacities?
as the basis for our
Questions How can the digital medium
be designed to redress its
own shortcomings?

69. How can we create the conditions for new readers to
develop a bi-literate brain and to know when
to skim and when to dive deeply?

70. A lecture about how the brain learns to leap
beyond the information given shouldn’t have
a last slide.....