My Brain on E-books

by

Stefanie C. Peters

As someone who has moved between countries four times and finally learned the painful lesson of why one ought to pack light, the idea of e-books, of being free from overfilled suitcases and sore backs and the inevitable “what did you pack, bricks?” joke and of carrying all of the books I love with me in one tiny electronic device at all times—and making them searchable!—is oh-so-attractive. But the truth is, though I have been able to leave teapots and blankets and bookcases behind, the thought of not taking my books with me when I move somewhere new is much more painful than the week of aches I can expect from hauling an overweight suitcase of books onto a train and thus to the airport.

My problem with e-books is the distractions. Most e-book readers today and in the future do not just let you read books—even the Kindle is promising future iPhone-style apps. On your computer and on your phone, you can now participate in dozens of social networks—Twitter and Facebook, for example, which I find it hard to do without—and also email (who can resist checking it once you hear that prepossessing ding?) and click links that will carry you from one page to another for hours of engrossment.

Computers were designed to think in a way that humans cannot. We humans educate ourselves to be able to think deeply and critically. We value writers for being able both to do this particularly well and also to communicate clearly the results of their ruminations. We invented computers, on the other hand, essentially to scan through large amounts of data quickly. This is what search engines do: scan swiftly through the enormous database of information that is the Internet to give us the piece of information we need. What is alarming, however, is that using computers is starting actually to change the way that we think.  Reading online means scanning for keywords, scrolling down through long paragraphs, feeling distracted by links, and slowly losing the willingness to engage with what we are reading

Of course, we are reading more than ever before on the Internet. Personally, I have about twenty literary blogs I check every day, and I regularly click through from links posted on Twitter and Facebook. Online, I read newspapers I had never come into contact with before a year or two ago. I am constantly reading.

But much of that reading isn’t true, engaged reading. Maybe it’s partly because reading on a screen is more difficult than reading printed material; the backlit screen is harder on our eyes, so we get tired faster. That and all those distractions decrease our attention spans. We are losing our ability to sit through a long article, or even one long paragraph.

It turns out that there is a part of our brains that acts as a filter for what we get to pay attention to. In “What the Heck Happened to our Attentions Spans,” Josh Catone explains that “there is a hierarchy at play . . . physical needs come first, but after that our brains tend to gravitate toward novel experiences. Our shortened attention spans can be blamed on the heightened pace at which we encounter these novel experiences in today’s media saturated world.” Similarily, researchers at the University of Melbourne, studying how different parts of the brain influence attention, concluded that the part of our brains making decisions is like a news editor, constantly receiving media alerts and needing to decide where to send its reporters. The danger in that is if we send all our reporters to cover the never-ending stream of celebrity gossip, there won’t be anyone left for an exposé on the healthcare situation.

We are being conditioned, in this age of 140-character thoughts, to expect novel experiences at every turn. Our brains begin to expect that stimulation not just when we are looking at a computer screen but all the time. Instead of being able to think deeply and read deeply, even when we read offline, after a few minutes we begin itching to check email, check Facebook, play a quick game of solitaire, or tweet something. We’re like Pavlov’s dogs, except that instead of salivating only when we see our feeders, our salivary glands are stuck in the “on,” position, and the drool running down our chins is making us look pretty dumb.

In the July/August 2008 issue of The Atlantic, Nicholas Carr described the phenomenon this way in “Is Google Making Us Stupid”:

Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.

This is the perfect description of what is now a not-uncommon experience. After his essay appeared in The Atlantic, Carr wrote on his blog that he had been flooded with emails from readers with similar experiences. It is a symptom of the times.

I would describe this inability to concentrate as like operating in a fog. For me, it has become increasingly difficult to get to that still, clear space where deep thinking is possible. Operating outside of that inner quiet, I don’t feel truly myself, as if, cut off from deep thought, I am also cut off from that part of my inner self that is most truly me. This fog of distraction, as I like to think of it, carries an unpleasant feeling of déjà vu. One week toward the end of my senior year at college, in 2008, stress—both personal and school-related—got to me and gave me my one brush with something like real depression, where leaving the house felt like an impossible task because it would have required too much energy. Getting dressed and going somewhere would have been as terrifying and draining as running a marathon. Phone calls were worse, because speaking to anyone was frightening in my ultra-timid state, and I was afraid they might think something was wrong with me. Better to stay in bed, because I knew well enough what was wrong. I was depressed—but I didn’t know how to come out of it. I was trapped and afraid. The low mood of depression manifested itself not in a loss of interest in anything, but in an intense feeling of inability. So for a week—a very long week—I stayed in bed, letting deadlines creep toward me unheeded.

I slept a lot, mostly at odd hours. Other times I lay awake, listening to my roommates come and go. Once in a while I’d sneak into the kitchen for food. But something—maybe my hard-wired guilt over idleness—made it clear to me that I needed to find some activity I could still do, that could help lead me back to normalcy. I couldn’t work on my thesis. I had several required phone interviews for a class but couldn’t summon the nerve to dial a single number. There were only so many times I could watch my Netflix rentals. So I turned to my bookshelves.

In college I always had at least forty library books checked out at a time, the volumes lined up on my bookcase and spilling over to neat stacks on the floor. I never got to them all, but I liked thinking I would. Several weeks before, I had grabbed every C. S. Lewis book the library had available. My copies of The Chronicles of Narnia were among my most prized possessions as a kid. I had read the books again and again, and every time I received a Blockbuster gift card for my birthday, Christmas, or Valentine’s Day, it went to renting the BBC version of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. Realizing I didn’t know what else Lewis had written, I borrowed every book of his they had, and so most of Lewis’s oeuvre had sat on my bookshelf waiting for a weekend when I would be far enough ahead of deadlines to dive into them. That day, I grabbed those of Lewis’s books that looked like lighter reading: his memoir Surprised by Joy, and his Space Trilogy—Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

It was like returning to the company of an old friend. In the Space Trilogy I discovered the same comfort, the same sense of the fantastic and the numinous that I had loved in Narnia, and in Lewis’s memoir I found a sensibility I could recognized as similar to my own. As I read, I felt as if the fear and the depression and the sleepless nights didn’t exist. I read under the covers and by the time I had worked my way through the last of the books, the fog was gone. The best of nonfiction—essays, biographies, memoirs—teach us to think on a higher plane. In reading Lewis’s memoir of his education, of the formation of his philosophy, of how he learned to think as he did, I learned to think deeply again.

So: imagine my distress when I was laid up in bed a year and a half later with a terrible stomachache and reached for another old friend—Jane Austen’s Emma—but did not find the comfort I expected. I read the first page but instead of sinking into her world I set the book down and  looked over at the closed laptop sitting on my desk. I debated whether I felt well enough to get up and check my e-mail. I decided I didn’t and picked up the book again. I read another page. I put the book down once more. Well, maybe I did feel like checking e-mails.

I sat up. My stomach gasped. Nope, I definitely needed to stay put. I looked around the room again. I felt—what, bored? Fidgety? I knew Emma would make me feel better, but I didn’t feel like reading. No—actually, I didn’t think I could concentrate on the reading. When did that happen?

Though we may feel like our brain doesn’t change after age—I don’t know, twelve maybe—it can actually keeps changing our whole lives. It is plastic, reprogrammable. Reading seems to be unusually sensitive to this. This is because, unlike language or vision, our brains are not hard-wired to be able to read. There is no innate does-not-need-assembly “reading circuit.” According to Maryanne Wolf (author of Proust and the Squid and one of the writers the New York Times Room for Debate blog assembled in October 2009 to answer the question, “Does the brain like e-books?”), each of us creates a “reading circuit” when we learn to read. Because it isn’t already there, waiting to be turned on, it “can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learners: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity,” and, I would add, medium—such as printed or electronic books. And that level of development can change. Like your biceps, if you don’t use it, it will shrink, get short-circuited.

Apparently mine did shrink, temporarily. And it felt like being depressed. But the bad news can also become good news: a healthy reading regimen, with a large dose of offline reading, can cure the distraction woes. After following a diet of printed magazines and newspapers for a few weeks, I was able to go back to Emma and read it again.

I realize this essay makes a dramatic claim, one backed up by absolutely no medical knowledge or expertise except some small amount of research into how the Internet affects the brain (and in fact I should disclose that my neurobiology major sister has expressed skepticism in my very premise). I am not, however, saying that the Internet makes anyone depressed. I can only share with you the way reading online changed my brain and made me feel terrible.

And too, this shouldn’t be taken as an apocalyptic statement of the end of reading, literature, and intelligence. Wolf makes the excellent point that when the Greeks transitioned from orality to literacy, Socrates worried that succeeding generations would lose the ability to reflect and contemplate meaningfully if everything were written down. We don’t know yet how children born today, who will be reared to read exclusively on the Internet and in e-books, will develop. Perhaps their brains will work—not better or worse than mine—but differently. But for me, reading offline gives my brain the juice it needs to operate. I can’t read, I can’t think, and I can’t write any other way. I’ll just have to come to grips with that overweight suitcase.

Stefanie Peters recently completed a masters degree in Shakespeare at University College London and also holds a BA in English and Creative Writing from Ohio State University. She edits the online magazine MadShakespeare.com; her own website is StefaniePeters.com. Stefanie recently moved from London to New York City, where she is looking for a job in publishing. She has an essay forthcoming in The Millions. Contact Stefanie.