Neural atrophy

There are heart and brain surgeries that take hours from the beginning to the end.  It takes a lot of focused work to get those done.  The surgeons and nurses working in operating rooms get there after years of intense and focused training over years.  Often, these are the same people who also spent hours as students focused on the learning materials in school.

One can easily think of many other professions that require undivided attention from its practitioners and wannabes. Will the "digital culture" affect the abilities of kids and adults to engage in deep and sustained practices?  Without the deep and sustained learning approach, are we looking at a rapid dumbing down?

I have been worried about this for a long time.  In my classes, for instance, I could easily see that reading and thinking about the ideas and information in the class materials was not something most students did; they were far more interested in endless swiping and texting on their smartphones. 

Of course, one could argue that most students even in the pre-digital era didn't engage in deep reading and thinking.  But, my suspicion that the percentages have worsened over time.

Reading V.S. Naipaul's The Engima of Arrival or Orhan Pamuk's Silent House is nowhere the digital skimming that is increasingly the norm.  I need to track the names of people and places, which were all "alien" especially in the Turkish novel.  Reading a lengthy novel over a few sittings over days meant that I had to remember everything that happened cumulatively.  A deep reading that is needed, unlike when I flick through my Twitter feed, for instance.

The implications of the loss of deep reading go far beyond literature.  One doesn't need a better example than the immediate former President of the US, who famously boasted that he didn't need to read books because he was already the smartest one around, and whose thinking and writing were expressed in tweets.

But, of course, we need to base our arguments on more than mere examples.  Maryanne Wolf writes:

Within this context, the “strong hypothesis” here is that if we are not vigilant, cognition will alter with little realization by most; the quality of our attention will change along with different forms of memory; and comprehension for complexity will change. Over time, there will be downstream effects on the quality of our background knowledge and of our understanding of others, which is the basis for seeking the “good” and discerning the “truth” of whatever we read or do next. The ultimate effects of such threats to how we process information and knowledge would weaken the basis of a thoughtful, empathic citizenry — the foundation of our democracy. Figuratively and physiologically, we will not be the wiser.

Don't you already see around you the loss of a thoughtful citizenry, who also seem to be incapable of discerning truth from misinformation and good from bad?

I agree with Wolf: "Deep reading, like the reading brain circuit itself, is not a given; it is built by use, or it atrophies from disuse."

It is unfortunate that there is seemingly nothing that we can do to prevent this atrophy.