For reasons we've explored, children struggling to read aren't going to be helped by the one-size-fits-all approach that is typical in so many schools. Rather, we need teachers who are trained to use a toolbox of principals that they can apply to different types of children.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.
Learning to read, for the brain, is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well.
We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to that environment's requirements - from different writing systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used.
The brain is constantly adapting.
We have to move into the 21st century, but we should do so with great care to build a 'bi-literate' brain that has the circuitry for 'deep reading' skills and, at the same time, is adept with technology.
The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.
My work on what is called 'deep reading' explores the range of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that underlie not only the emergence of creative thought when we read but also the development and strengthening of capacities like empathy and critical analysis that we can apply to the rest of our lives.
There's an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice.
Reading or written language is a cultural invention that necessitated totally new connections among structures in the human brain underlying language, perception, cognition, and, over time, our emotions.
No one can ever prepare a parent for two things: the immeasurable love that comes with having a child; and the sorrow and confusion that comes when your child appears to learn in a different way from other children.
There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.
I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.
The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.
The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text.
Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don't read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds.
After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.
There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.
I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive immersion, the joy and the effort of the third life, of thinking one's own thoughts and going beyond what is given.
