Who says reading is in decline?

I was struck in reading today's New York Times that the number of pieces on reading and books must have reached some sort of critical mass. Or perhaps it was only the Times's effort to assert its own relevance?

The online edition has begun a series called Draft. It concerns the art of writing and its maiden voyage was a riffy, elegiac essay by Jhumpa Lahiri on the pleasure she finds in sentences (the written not the served kind). This was flanked in the Sunday Review by two more essays. One by Dwight Garner where the message was on the medium - what sort of reading calls for e-readers, iPads, or the printed page, he asks? He cited the recent New York Review of Books essay by novelist Tim Parks (speaking of books in the news) which championed electronic reading media as

Reading with recycled neurons (Books - Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene)

Reading in the Brain by Stanislas Dehaene is a readable account of how the reading brain works, as well as how it doesn't.  Given the fact that printed text is a relatively recent human invention and, given the time scale of evolution, the brain could not have evolved specialized structures for reading per se but rather has adapted structures that evolved for more general visual purposes and applied them to this specialized task which combines seeing and recognizing objects and the reception of the abstract thoughts of another person. The form of letters have little to do with the meaning they ultimately communicate. As a result it has become the work of seven to ten of our earlier years to learn rote the relationship between our culture's symbols representing the units of sound (phonemes).  These are combined into (words) from which we generate continuous phrases and sentences which accomplish the transfer of information and point of view. This is done at a minimum with some coherence, if not also some beauty, and the composer of those same units of meaning doesn't even have to be around to explain himself. It might seem roundabout that printed text has to take a two step journey from sound to meaning rather than going straight to meaning, but this is what allows language to communicate abstract thought:

I suspect that any radical reform whose aim would be to ensure a clear, one-to-one transcription of English speech would be bound to fail, because the role of spelling is not just to provide a faithful transcription of speech sounds. Voltaire was mistaken when he stated, elegantly but erroneously, that "writing is the painting of the voice: the more it bears a resemblance, the better." A written text is not a high-fidelity recording. Its goal is not to reproduce speech as we pronounce it, but rather to code it at a level abstract enough to allow the reader to quickly retrieve its meaning.

The brain accomplishes this remarkable feat, Dehaene tells us (without even being there), via two pathways that operate simultaneously when reading is fluent. One path transfers the letter-string to it sound content (and the motor requirements of our making that sound with our vocal apparatus) prior to its meaning, and the other that goes for the identity of the word first and then the sound. A great number of pages in the book is spent on discussing the fruits of Dehaene and his colleague Laurent Cohen's labors identifying the left hemisphere's visual word-form area, a region of the brain whose purpose seems to be to be the visual analysis of the symbols that make up letters and words irrespective of their superficial differences. That is to say we can read word, WORD, or even WoRd equally easily and can tell the difference between ANGER and RANGE. You can see the visual word-form area in the picture representing the relative activity of regions of Dehaene's reading brain below, its the area right above his ear. There are other areas that accomplish the conversion of printed text into units of sound, still others that agree on the meaning of the assembly given not only its form but its context.
The typical right-handed person's brain has developed most of its key language processing areas in the left hemisphere (left handers are less reliable in this regard). This is true whether the personn reads from left to right or right to left and whether they read an alphabet whose symbols map to units of sound (as in these roman letters you are reading right now) or comprise pictures of whole words (as in logographic alphabets like Chinese). Dehaene, in fact, explores the evolution of different writing systems from pictoral markers in depth as he builds his case for how the human brain evolved the skill of reading, a section of the book I very much enjoyed.

Much of this case centers on the brain's ability to adapt cortex to multiple functions, something he calls neuronal recycling.

We would not be able to read if our visual system did not spontaneously implement operations close to those indispensable for word recognition, and if it were not endowed with a small dose of plasticity that allows it to learn new shapes. During schooling, a part of this system rewires itself into a reasonably good device for invariant letter and word recognition.

According to this view, our cortex is not a blank slate or a wax tablet that faithfully records any cultural invention, however arbitrary. Neither is it an inflexible organ that has somehow, over the course of evolution, dedicated a "module" to reading. A better metaphor would be to liken our visual cortex to a Lego construction set, with which a child can build the standard model shown on the box, but also tinker with a variety of other inventions.

My hypothesis disagrees with the "no constraints" approach so common in the social sciences, according to which the human brain is capable of absorbing any form of culture. The truth is that nature and culture entertain much more intricate relations. Our genome, which is the product of millions of years of evolutionary history, specifies a constrained, if partially modifiable cerebral architecture that imposes severe limits on what we can learn. New cultural inventions can only be acquired insofar as they fit the constraints of our brain architecture.

In the book's final chapter, Dehaene discusses cortical plasticity - a neuroscientific idea that is relatively recent and much in vogue.  It is the ability of brain's neuron's to adapt their function from one purpose to another - for example, when a blind person's visual cortex cells become able to decode sensation of the fingertips to braille letters.  Dehaene makes a case for the necessity of cortical plasticity in inventing cultural forms like number systems and the arts. It's one of those fun bits of reaching for the stars that a researcher has to save for when they write a book rather than a journal article. His voice comes off a little stuffy at times, but his theory is intricate - composed of many interleaving units - so his writing must be systematic in driving home each concept and then attaching is to its predecessor. His model for how the brain accomplishes reading, I must emphasize, is one of several, but he does acknowledge alternate viewpoints along the way. The lay reader may not find this book as accessible as Maryanne Wolf's Proust and the Squid, but it goes into more depth and synthesizes a lot of information into a coherent narrative arc. His diction is clear and the reading experience fluid and even entertaining. Dehaene's work is at the cutting edge of our understanding about the relationship between language and the brain so I found it a pleasure to get the story from one of its sources.

If you in or around NYC on Thursday March 13 at 6pm, join me for a film about dyslexia called THE BIG PICTURE: RETHINKING DYSLEXIA.  Click here for information.

Killing giants, myth busting and other valiant deeds (Books - The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing & Reading in the Brain)

I just came across two excerpts in Richard Dawkins's collection of science writing that reminded me what gives me pleasure about reading science. One is geneticist J. B. S. Haldane's "On Being the Right Size" and the other, Zoologist Mark Ridley's "On Being the Right Sized Mates" from his 1983 book The Explanation of Organic Diversity. Haldane's essay muses on how the physical structure of animals evolved to the "right" size for their makeup. As an example he uses the giants from the books of his childhood,

These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross-sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bones had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every times they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one's respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

I love the fact that Haldane uses his childhood memory of Pilgrim's Progress to communicate to his reader what he is thinking about the physiological evolution of animal life. The best teaching occurs, I think, when the teacher themselves can get back to what initially ignited their own interest about their subject and communicate from that vantage point. Haldane then goes on a musing spree which covers the structure of members of the animal kingdom ranging from insects to giraffes. How an insect's structure allows it to fall without danger, but if it gets wet it is likely to drown. Tall animals require a certain strength pump and vessels for the circulatory system that convey blood to their extremities, however, this puts them at risk for high blood pressure or problems associated with vascular weakness. How do wings permit flight? How do different respiratory structures - those that have evolved with gills and those with lungs - accomplish the oxygenation of blood? And given these diverse means, what are the upper limits of the size of the animal that possesses them? Haldane not only informs us of the vagaries of the natural world we are a part of, he communicates the verve with which he observes that world, and with witty prose drives the reader forward. It is little wonder that he inspired Mark Ridley's observation that species have evolved to favor homogamy, that is, like mates with like. What I enjoyed about this brief essay is Ridley's debunking of the well-entrenched myth that in human affairs of the heart, opposites attract.

'it is a trite proverb that tall men marry little women...a man of genius marries a fool,' a habit which Murray explained as 'the effort of nature to preserve the typical medium of the race.' The same thought was expressed by the vast intellect of Jeeves, to explain the otherwise mysterious attractions of Bertie for all those female enthusiasts of Kant and Schopenhauer. The source of this proverbial belief is not certainly known; but one possibility can be ruled out. It did not originate in observation: humans mate homogamously (or perhaps randomly) for both stature and intelligence.

Myth-busting is not just a darn good time - especially when indulged in with such gusto - but doubting our assumptions is vital to the continued development of our knowledge. This is also another of many instances in Dawkins's juicy compendium in which learning something new is married to lucid, entertaining writing. The danger of this volume, however, is its tendency to bloat the TBR list. I've made it a rule to only jot down my desired titles at this point, and not engage in any impulse buying. We'll see how long that holds! Here are my other posts related to The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing 1, 2.

I have also begun Stanislas Dehaene's recent book Reading in the Brain and, speaking of gills, it is packed to them with information about how the brain accomplishes the act you are performing right now - reading. An accessible and engagingly written volume. I tore through the first 60 pages. More on that soon.

The pleasures of insufficiency...

Suggested by Janet: I’ve seen this quotation in several places lately. It’s from Sven Birkerts’ ‘The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age’:

“To read, when one does so of one’s own free will, is to make a volitional statement, to cast a vote; it is to posit an elsewhere and set off toward it. And like any traveling, reading is at once a movement and a comment of sorts about the place one has left. To open a book voluntarily is at some level to remark the insufficiency either of one’s life or one’s orientation toward it.”

To what extent does this describe you?

To travel to another place (or time) is certainly one kind of volitional reading experience. When I conducted an informal research project (1, 2) on susceptibility to the reading experience, the sense of being transported away from the place we're in or to another place, was a commonly reported occurrence in the 92 respondents who participated, so one might even say that it is more than merely metaphoric. I do sometimes specifically read to go elsewhere, i.e. to escape, however I can also read to go more deeply towards myself. I would consider that a travel of sorts, but not a move away. I also read volitionally for information, and when I do I feel rather that I am holding my place in the present by seeking a specific piece of information referent to it. I may go briefly to another place, but with one eye fixed firmly on my current location. I'm reading to come back when the information is gained. It's like beginning to go through the wardrobe to Narnia, but constantly looking back and seeing the coats.

As for the second part of the question, I would answer yes. To seek the world of a book is to at some level admit the insufficiency of your current place and time, but not necessarily admit its wholesale failure. I read for new experience and new information and insomuch as I do that, I must be considering my current fund of information or my current experience less than perfectly pleasing. I know we supposedly seek pleasure and avoid danger on a very basic level, but I think of complacency as a dirty word. I want new experiences - set in fiction or as memoir, biography or travelogue - I crave to know more about the states and actions of other people, other places, and other times. I want new recipes, new scuttlebutt about Stalin, a new way of thinking about the impact of World War I, new information about how the brain works, new insight into a favorite artist's process (and a picture of their work space) and a new story about some attorney who contracts a disease that forces him to walk endlessly forward. I want the frame they provide to open up the way I experience my own life or to reinvigorate what I think I already know. I want after reading to see greener greens. I want my wine to taste better. I want to enrich the context that is my life, and to the extent that I crave that, I admit its current insufficiency. That's not to say that I'm eternally miserable, only that I know that I don't know everything and that its worth finding out more. And inherent to that ritual of going out from this place to new places via books (and other means like experience of other arts, or actual travel) is the search for new books, their acquisition, and the pleasant anticipation of reading them from this place of comfort. I enjoy that pleasure every day, which is to say that being in this place of insufficiency is not endless pain, even if I live in longing. If I'm honest about it, it will never be sufficient and that insufficiency is, in itself, a kind of pleasure.

Reading Research Results - concluded

I asked you all if you thought that one's affinity for reading would affect one's susceptibility to the experience of reading fiction.
62% of you said that you thought so
37% of you said that you did not
and since only 8 of you voted, don't take those percentages too seriously.

I discovered when I looked at how your 88 scores on the reading susceptibility test differed as a function of your "reading affinity score" that there was a big difference (F = 3.0, p < .005) but not across the board. Susceptibility increased sharply for those the lowest reading affinities (1-3) - a 3-fold increase. Those with affinity scores from 4-9 more or less leveled off, with a slight dip around a rating of 7. Remember, I defined reading affinity as a combination of how much people read, whether they identified as "readers" or "a book person," whether they belonged to a book club, and so on. I combined scores from many of what I called "reading identification questions." So it did matter if you had a lower affinity, but once you identified more strongly with reading, it didn't matter how strongly.

Cam had an interesting question as to whether reading responsiveness varied as a function of one's area of study in school. As I didn't ask about that specifically I'm not able to analyze it, but I did look at responsiveness as a function of level of education and I found that it did not matter in any significant way.

I also looked at level of religiousness, offering categories from atheist - orthodox. I was interested to find that the participants had a very equal distribution through those categories with a lower representation only in the "orthodox" category. For example, as many people identified themselves as "serious practicing" as they did "skeptical." There was absolutely no meaningful difference between any of these categories as to how susceptible or responsive to reading you are.

I was interested to find that something we think of as being transported either away from the place we're in or to another place as a result of reading was indeed a common occurrence among you, but with a wide variety of intensities reported. Whereas the sense of being transported to another time, or losing one's sense of time was experienced by everyone, with you reporting more than 3:1 that you experience this strongly. This could just be an effect of the way I asked the question. Other commonly reported experiences among you were wishing to alter the action of the story or a character in it, and having your heart rate sped up by something you were reading.

I really enjoyed looking at some of these patterns among the reading behavior of our select group and I appreciate your help with it. As I develop the reading research further, I may prevail upon your good will again. Hope you found it interesting.

The results are coming in! (Reading Research)

Many of you were kind enough to help me last month by answering a reading survey I conducted - thank you again. I promised some results. Here they are. You can scroll past the whole intro if you wish and get the cut to the chase version.

Intro
It's a tricky thing reporting results from research, especially when conducted by asking people about themselves. You may have noticed that when I write about articles from the Science Times, I critique the experiment. That' s not because I imagine I'm smarter than the creator of the study, it's because no study can be perfect. No study can ask every question from every angel, it would be too long. Some studies inquire not about finite knowledge but about constructs, as in the case of my survey - the construct was susceptibility to the experience created by interaction with a fictional narrative. In that case another researcher could define that construct differently and ask different questions. If a study asks only similar questions about the experience of reading fiction - let's say it only looks at internal experiences like being made to feel sad or aroused - one could then criticize it for omitting behaviors that are more confirmable - like a quickly beating heart or turning on more lights in your home. If a survey includes a wider variety of questions - some about how often they have these internal and external experiences, and others about the degree of that experience - e.g. a question about reading some thing suspenseful or scary had choices ranging from - "It's fun, but I don't literally care..." to "Gets me involved so that I am tense/sweaty, etc..." The survey designer must decide whats more useful - focus or breadth. If breadth - do the different types of questions receive the same number of points each? Is doing something the most frequently numerically equivalent to doing something the most intensely? In any event, designing a survey is fraught with questions, it's not as simple as saying, Gee, I think I'll ask a bunch of people about chewing gum today...

The second tricky part is interpreting the results. What does a survey that asks people to report on their own behaviors actually measure? Articles will tell you it means that they felt the feeling 78% of the time or 15% feel it very deeply, but that's not accurate. What they can say with certainty is that respondents reported feeling the feeling 78% of the time. We don't know for certain that because someone said they had an experience that they did and that they all did so in the same way. Or that one person's most intense degree of feeling is equivalent to another person's. It's not simply a matter of whether a respondent is being truthful. Some people's answers are weighted by what they think they should answer, others by what they think the experimenter would like to hear, some are highly sensitive judges of their own experience, others are relatively insensitive. It's why I frequently talk about the narrative of science, because when we report results from studies we tell a story about them to give them meaning in the context of what we wish to know. With those provisos you should know that there are tools that help create strict standards for saying we are certain about something and the degree of that certainty and those are the dreaded statistics - the class that is the bane of every social science student. I hear the collective groan my 101 students used to give me every time we discussed not the fun concepts but the tests used to assess them. I'll leave out all the complicated stuff here but know that I did use them in order to try to keep my interpretations honest.

My question:
Do reader's vary in their susceptibility to involvement in the experience created by interaction with a fictional narrative? If so, under what circumstances?

I am trying to develop a way to measure that susceptibility. The survey some of you took was my first draft. It was buried among other questions about demographics, other reading behavior, and another already existing survey about openness to experiences in general.

Results

Who?
92 of you of whom I could use responses from 88 (20 men/68 women)
Ages: 18 - 63 (men, mean age 41.4/women, mean age 33.6)

From where:
Western Europe, South America, Australia, and Asia - 13%
Canada - 9 %
U.S. - 78%

Education:
High School - 6%
Some College - 18%
College - 31%
Some Graduate School - 10%
Graduate - 35%

Number of languages you read in:
1 - 69%
2 - 26%
3 - 4%
4 + - 1%

Reading Frequency:
fewer than 1 book/month - 16%
2-3 books/month -34%
1 book/week -15%
2-4 books/week - 29%
4+ books/week - 6%

What is great about the reading frequency numbers is that there is a good distribution among frequencies, i.e. the survey has no choice but to question people who read, but the results are not skewed towards only those who read a lot either by virtue of speed, free time, or enthusiasm.

I also computed a score I called the "reading affinity score," which was culled from various questions regarding reading frequency, self-identification as a "reader" or "book person," whether participants have a literary blog or belong to a book club. Those scores ranged from 1 to 9 and were almost normally distributed, which means that most people were in the middle of this range with fewer people at the upper and lower ends.

Reading Affinity:
1 - 1%
2 - 3%
3 - 12%
4 - 26%
5 - 9%
6 - 22%
7 - 17%
8 - 9%
9 - 1%

There were also questions about reasons for reading which are complex, but to summarize, way more of you read for reasons like pleasure, education, escape and comfort, than read for obligation.


Some of the patterns:
The possibilities are endless. I'm going to give you a few patterns that I noticed, but if you are curious to know how certain other factors related to each other (e.g. did women read more than men? or Did having completed more schooling effect how susceptible you were to your reading experience?) ask me, and if I can figure it out from the information I collected I will tell you what I observe.

First I tested the reliability of my survey. I found that it seemed to test a unitary construct rather than several distinct constructs when tested with two different measures. For those of you for whom it has any meaning for coefficient alpha r = .85 and for split-half reliability, applying the Spearman Brown correction r = .87.

I tested the validity of my survey - i.e. does it measure what I say it measures - in a bunch of different ways. I compared it to another scale that measures openness in general and absorption related to imaginative involvement. My correlation was not terrific, however it was significant by statistical standards (r = .46, p < .01). I also tried some other measures that you may or may not think are meaningful. I compared the scale to a portion of another scale measuring synesthesia - a condition in which a person experiences an intermingling of two or more senses (i.e. they see specific numbers as specific colors or experience specific musical notes as having odors. By the way scientists can confirm this is actually happening, we're not taking people's word for it, nor is this describing a metaphoric experience - it is actual.). I did this correlation not because I think there should be a relationship between reading susceptibility and synesthesia but because I think there should not. This is called a divergent analysis and my suspicions were confirmed - correlation was very low and demonstrated no significance (r = .17, p = .12).

Then I compared women's and men's susceptibility scores, given that vulnerability and expression of many emotions are seen as socially more acceptable in most of the places in which our respondents reside. The difference was very apparent. Women scored significantly higher than men (F - 5.0, p < .03). Since women outnumbered men 3:1, I took a subset - 20 of each sex and matched them for age, level of education, and how frequently they read. I still saw a difference with women's scores significantly higher than men's (F = 4.3, p < .05). Does that mean that women are actually more susceptible? Not necessarily, it could mean that they are more willing to report that they are. It could also express a difference in men's and women's awareness of their experience rather than whether it was actually physically different. But scientific conclusions are best stated by observing convergences and divergences of many sorts of information versus making grand conclusions based on 1 single statistic or another. So consider this 1 piece of information in an accumulating pattern.

Then I compared susceptibility scores based on the reading affinity score I computed. Any guesses? Does one's affinity for reading (as computed by my imperfect method) effect one's susceptibility to the experience of reading (as assessed by my imperfect survey)? I'll give you some more results after I hear your predictions. Take the poll near the top of my side bar.

READING RESEARCH

I just wanted to let you know that I had not forgotten my promise to post some observations derived from the reading survey, but first I have to do the analyses for my paper for class and hand it in. We're in the home stretch leading up to the end of the semester so things are a little busy around here. I'll do my best to post it soon.

Research Update

Thank you. You are all tremendous!! I had so many people respond - nearly 100 in the past 36 hours - that I have closed the survey for now. There is a chance I will need to add some data and re-open, but what is more likely is that I will analyze the data now for two things: some of the trends that your responses suggest, and the quality of the questions I've devised. At some point I may revise my questions and re-open it. This analysis may take me a little while. But I will give you a report as soon as I am able.

What a generous and spirited community I have found in bloggers and blog readers- thank you!

PARTICIPATE IN MY RESEARCH ON THE EXPERIENCE OF READING FICTION!

PLEASE HELP BY PARTICIPATING IN MY RESEARCH ON THE EXPERIENCE OF READING FICTION!

As many of you know, I am a graduate student in cognitive neuroscience. I am beginning to conduct some informal research on the experience of reading fiction. I am collecting responses at Survey Monkey - a site that helps one conduct on-line surveys. If you are visiting my blog I wouldn't be surprised if you were interested in books and reading yourself. It would be so helpful if you would be willing to click the link below and participate! It should take about 6-10 minutes. There is no identifying information collected with these responses - I am collecting no identifying information and have disabled anything that lets one trace email addresses or IP addresses - so your answers are completely anonymous. I hope to share some of the fruits of your labors and my analyses here at my blog, which should be fun for all you book fiends. Finally, no organization or corporation public or private is sponsoring this survey.

I am looking for at least 60 participants, although I wouldn't mind more! So feel free to direct friends and family here to click the link below, or share this url with them:

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=ErmxuDQnnA2v_2fYZ0rg21JQ_3d_3d

Participants do not have to be avid readers, they can be occasional or even unenthusiastic readers - I would like as broadly representative a sample as I can find.

Click Here to take survey

Thank you!