Don't Melt Your Brain into the Machine
People are reading less, writing less, scrolling more, and off-loading more cognition to AI. We're doing ourselves in.
You have hopefully by now read the Atlantic cover story The End of Reading. It says more or less exactly that: Americans are reading much, much less than they used to. We actually take in more words than we used to, thanks to algorithmic social media and doing everything on our smartphones, but actually reading things like books or even full magazine articles or news stories has become rarer and rarer.
The story contains many troubling anecdotes: The Harvard undergraduate who complained about a book written in Old English, and had to use Chat GPT to translate it; the book was A Clockwork Orange, written in 1962. The three-year-old who started preschool and cried every day for weeks — not for her mother, but for her tablet. It also contains some observations I haven’t seen as well-articulated anywhere else: That writing transformed the human brain and our consciousness, allowing for logic, rationality, analytical thought, deduction, complexity, and focus. This anecdote particularly stands out:
Ong cited case studies by the neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, who traveled to remote villages in Uzbekistan and Kirghizia in the 1930s, when peasants were starting to receive rudimentary reading and writing instruction. Luria met his subjects at teahouses, in field camps, and around evening fires. There, he posed a number of questions designed to elucidate differences in how illiterate and literate peasants thought. Luria told the peasants: “In the Far North, all bears are white. Novaya Zemlya is in the Far North.” He then asked them the color of bears in Novaya Zemlya. The literate peasants were able to complete the syllogism. But the illiterate ones refused to try, explaining that they had never been to the north and thus couldn’t answer. Achieving literacy seemed to have conveyed an ability to think logically and abstractly, not simply to read words.
Without reading and writing, the Atlantic piece argues, we wouldn’t have “philosophy, modern science, history as an academic enterprise, art criticism.”
Reading — really reading, and mucking through complex ideas, not just being spoon-fed single-sentence directives on social media or by AI — sharpens the mind and allows us to develop more complex cognition. Not reading, or decreasing how much we’re reading, allows those skills to atrophy, or never develop in the first place. Our current reality of social media outrage-baiting, easy-to-digest short-form videos, communication via text, reliance on AI to solve every-day problems (“using these ingredients, tell me what to make for dinner;” “make me a work-out plan for this week”), TV shows that have changed to meet our attention deficits — all of this adds up to brains that are more distracted but less engaged. We are more stimulated but less challenged.
This has political consequences.
