This Conversation About the 'Reading Mind' Is a Gift

Every day, we consume a mind-boggling amount of information. We scan online news articles, sift through text messages and emails, scroll through our social-media feeds — and that’s usually before we even get out of bed in the morning. In 2009, a team of researchers found that the average American consumed about 34 gigabytes of information a day. Undoubtedly, that number would be even higher today. But what are we actually getting from this huge influx of information? How is it affecting our memories, our attention spans, our ability to think? What might this mean for today’s children, and future generations? And what does it take to read — and think — deeply in a world so flooded with constant input? Maryanne Wolf is a researcher and scholar at U. C. L. A.’s School of Education and Information Studies. Her books “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain” and “Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World” explore the relationship between the process of reading and the neuroscience of the brain. And, in Wolfe’s view, our era of information overload represents a historical inflection point where our ability to read — truly, deeply read, not just scan or scroll — hangs in the balance. We discuss why reading is a fundamentally “unnatural” act, how scanning and scrolling differ from “deep reading,” why it’s not accurate to say that “reading” is just one thing, how our brains process information differently when we’re reading on a Kindle or a laptop as opposed to a physical book, how exposure to such an abundance of information is rewiring our brains and reshaping our society, how to rediscover the lost art of reading books deeply, what Wolf recommends to those of us who struggle against digital distractions, what parents can do to to protect their children’s attention, how Wolf’s theory of a “biliterate brain” may save our species’ ability to deeply process language and information and more. Mentioned: The Glass Bead Game (Magister Ludi) by Hermann Hesse How We Read Now by Naomi S. Baron The Shallows by Nicholas Carr Yiruma Book Recommendations: The Gilead Novels by Marilynne Robinson World and Town by Gish Jen Standing by Words by Wendell Berry Love’s Mind by John S. Dunne Middlemarch by George Eliot Thoughts? Email us at [email protected]. (And if you’re reaching out to recommend a guest, please write “Guest Suggestion” in the subject line.) You can find transcripts (posted midday) and more episodes of “The Ezra Klein Show” at nytimes.com/ezra-klein-podcast, and you can find Ezra on Twitter @ezraklein. Book recommendations from all our guests are listed at https://www.nytimes.com/article/ezra-klein-show-book-recs.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:06Ezra Klein?

  I'm Ezra Klein. This is the Ezra Klein Show.

• 0:23Ezra Klein?

  Here is the thesis of this conversation, put simply. How we read is as deserving of attention as what we read, maybe even more so. And how we read, it has changed dramatically in just a few short years. And that means our minds, the way we think and interpret and reflect on the world, they've changed too, and at stunning speed. Literacy is an experiment humankind ran on itself, that we ran on ourselves pretty recently, actually. And it has had remarkable, wondrous results. It has changed us and it has changed our societies. In recent decades, the shift to thinking and reading amidst a cacophony of digital information

• 1:07Ezra Klein?

  and dialogue and text, that is another experiment we're running on ourselves. And it is also a seismic one, and it is ongoing, and it is early. And we don't know how it will turn out. We don't.

• 1:21Ezra Klein?

  But people are trying to figure that out. Marian Wolf is a professor at UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. And she's one of the world's leading experts on how reading works in, and even more importantly, how it works on the brain, how it changes the brain. She's the author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of a Reading Brain, and of Reader Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, among other books. And don't worry, she's not someone who thinks we can or should turn back the clock to try to return to some kind of pre-digital reading utopia. That's not possible, nor was it a utopia. And I'm not that person either. My whole career, my whole life is built on digital text.

• 2:03Ezra Klein?

  Her idea is something different, that we need to understand what different kinds of reading do to our minds. And then we need to develop in ourselves and our children what she calls a biliterate brain. And as you'll hear here, she's just a lovely person to listen to and to think alongside. As always, if you have guest suggestions, feedback, things you think we should read, my email is ezra kline show at nytimes.com.

• 2:34Ezra Klein?

  Mary Ann Wolf, welcome to the show.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  Oh, what a pleasure it is to be able to talk to you, not just write letters to the New York Times in reaction to your essays.

• 2:46Ezra Klein?

  Write a lot of angry screeds, that damn Ezra.

• 2:49Speaker 01

  No anger, actually total appreciation for the essay you wrote in August. The medium really is the message.

• 2:58Ezra Klein?

  Well, I appreciate that. And we're going to talk about McLuhan and the mediums are the messages. But I want to start here. You argue in Reader Come Home that reading is a quote, a natural process. Tell me what you mean by that.

• 3:12Speaker 01

  Well, one of the striking insights that I had, if you will, a tiny epiphany. When I first began to write about reading, which was in 2007, it was a book called Proust and the Squid, The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. I realized that there was nothing in the brain, not a single gene, not a single region that was specifically there for reading. That's very unlike all the other processes that are actually incorporated in reading, language, vision, cognition, affect. If you think about language, that is a natural process.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  There's a genetic program in which it unfolds. There's nothing like that for reading. We were never meant to read. But what is amazing is that the brain does have this almost semi miraculous capacity to make new circuits within itself, using the processes that are genetically there, but in new ways. So what the brain has is a capacity to make novel circuits. And the invention, the human invention of reading, required a new circuit.

• 4:37Speaker 01

  So the brain very gradually learned how to connect parts that were there for other reasons and made a new circuit that became the first underlying network for reading very simple symbols, you know, 6,000 years ago. But it was never the case that we were meant to read, which has real implications. Now Ezra, the reason why it is essential to understand it's unnatural is that that circuit that is formed, that novel circuit is plastic. And that's what makes it very different

• 5:21Speaker 01

  from the other wonderful processes we were given by nature.

• 5:26Ezra Klein?

  Well, one of the things I want to get at here, before we get into plasticity and flexibility. But without getting too deep into the neuroscience, one of the things that your book emphasizes and that you convinced me of is that reading is a very misleading term because it's singular. And you make this point that reading is not one thing at all. It's many things. So tell me a bit about that multiplicity.

• 5:54Speaker 01

  So I will return a little back to neuroscience only as a way of scaffolding what I'm going to say. And that is when we first learn to read, we have this most basic circuit. It's just putting together the visual processes that identify a letter or a character with a word, with what we know about the word. So it's putting vision and language together. That's one form of reading. That's a very basic form of what we could call decoding. But from then on, according to our environment, we begin to elaborate that circuit. And so we become prepared, if you will,

• 6:39Speaker 01

  to read in totally different ways from that very simplified form of reading, which we call decoding. And the more we know, the more we add to that circuit. So the more we have as background knowledge, we are preparing that circuit to grow in ever more sophisticated ways. Now, the most interesting aspect for me about reading is that it's continuous. It's evolving. It's based on everything that went before. Or it can be a very primitive way of using that decoding circuit,

• 7:22Speaker 01

  so that we just are skimming the top, if you will, of the processes. And we get the information and we have a very basic content. But if, over time, we have begun to elaborate this brain so that it includes deep reading, the unnatural apex of the achievement of reading is what deep reading provides. And that means there are different levels in which we can participate in the text. We can use our ability to take on another perspective, to read in a whole different way.

• 8:05Speaker 01

  We are entering, almost like the theory of mind of another and also their feelings. This is a totally different form of reading than the one that we are talking about when we are saying we read, you know, for information. Now, I can go and will go further into what's even, if you will, deeper than critical analysis and empathy. But the accrual of all these more sophisticated processes means that we can read at multiple levels. We can read with our attention simply skimming the surface. And that's part of why Nicholas Carr used the term shallows.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  That's why some of my colleagues in Norway even talk about the shallowing hypothesis. Many, many of us have, if you will, regressed to that earliest form of reading in which we are barely skimming the surface of what we read, barely consolidating it in memory. And we are, in fact, reading less of what is there as a result.

• 9:20Ezra Klein?

  Ooh, I'm really trying to decide if I want to keep the structure I'd intended here or jump around a bit. So let me say this because maybe it's a good way of signposting where I'm going for everybody listening. I'm interested in your work and I'm interested in this conversation because I'm interested in the states you can achieve while reading. And we talk about reading typically in terms of the content, as if the question of reading is what you read. And what your work is getting at is that at least as important a question is how you read, the process by which you read,

• 10:01Ezra Klein?

  the distractions, the physical formats, the qualities and levels of attention you bring. And this gets to something that you pointed out a minute or two ago, which is plasticity. Talk a bit about plasticity and its relationship to reading.

• 10:20Speaker 01

  The most important two words that I will use in this next part of the discussion are attention, the quality of attention, and insight, epiphany.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  There is a quick line between attention and shallow memory that is possible because we have a plastic brain. It doesn't tell us exactly what to do. Rather, this plasticity is dependent on the medium in which we read, the language or writing system or orthography in which we read, and even the educational background that taught us how to read in particular ways.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Now, I bring us back to the two words, attention and insight. Plasticity means that the way we read will be reflecting the affordances of the medium. This was a point that McLuhan made, his student Walter Ong made, certainly Postman made, as you indicated in your August essay. All of these people were on to the basic principle that how we read on a medium

• 11:56Speaker 01

  changes what we discern, what we comprehend. Now, I'm going to push just slightly this plasticity into the affordances of digital versus print. The affordances of the digital screen are really exciting. They help us skim the extraordinary voluminous nature of information that's out there. Skimming is a defense mechanism that's very useful. We can handle so much information. And your job

• 12:33Speaker 01

  Ezra and mine involves six to 10 hours a day of sampling information, if you will, making sure we're aware. But how we are reading it will change the nature of what we have absorbed. And many people are asking me, in fact, I did an NPR program on why people don't feel the same immersiveness in the reading experience. And it's very simple. Because the affordances of the digital medium, which enhance the speed in which we're reading and focusing on vast amounts of information,

• 13:17Speaker 01

  multitasking, and being entertained, if you will, being engaged at that level, all of that actually takes away from the ability to use the full circuitry, the full circuitry which includes using your background knowledge to infer, to deduce, the truth value, to feel what that author is feeling in a work of fiction, to understand a completely different perspective. All of that takes time. The print medium's affordances

• 14:00Speaker 01

  advantage the giving, the allocation of time to words, concepts, in a way that when we skim, we simply don't have the same amount of time to process. So plasticity changes the nature of attention. Attention is very sophisticated and complex. But the amount of attention that we have is going to be influenced by all the distractions that you just discussed as you framed my question. But it will lead ultimately to the diminution of the time necessary for the insights at the end.

• 14:47Ezra Klein?

  I want to step away from, for a minute, the digital versus print, because before we get there, I want to get a little bit more into this idea. It's not just that mediums change us. I was thinking about this language. It's that habits change us. It's that what we do again and again changes us. So you, you have the term in your book, use it or lose it. For something maybe as unnatural, as you put it, is reading. Maybe a way of thinking about it is build it or lose it. But give me some examples of skills that we can strengthen or that we can weaken, depending on how we read.

• 15:26Speaker 01

  We develop, you call it habits. I call it mindsets in which we develop a way of doing things. With our background in print, we developed a very particular mindset that you possess Ezra and I as what we were, if you will, formed. And that's how we were formed as readers. I call this moment in time technologically a hinge moment. As we've moved to the other side of that hinge moment, we have made our habit of reading largely on screens. So imperceptibly,

• 16:10Speaker 01

  we are developing a mindset or habit of reading in a particular way that by and large is based on a kind of skimming reading, again, because of all the information we have to process in any given day. So the habit or mindset is now so largely influenced by us reading on screens that we take that mindset even back to print. We can build habits of mind, a kind of reading that's after the innermost landscape of our thinking.

• 16:54Speaker 01

  Whether we call it the sanctuary of reading. Proust always had something amazing to say about everything. He saw the heart of reading as the place where we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own. How do we build a habit of mind in which we decide from the start of whatever we are reading, what is the purpose? If the purpose is my shallow email, then I will skim with no guilt at all. But if my intention or my purpose is to really understand something at ever deeper

• 17:36Speaker 01

  levels of its complexity, or to perceive the beauty of that carefully chosen word, when we are reading for that purpose, for beauty, for understanding at the deepest level, then we have to really figure out how to use either printout and use print, or how to ensure that we can read on any medium with the deep reading processes as our goal.

• 18:10Ezra Klein?

  So I want to pause on that Proust quote, because it's really the heart of this conversation, too. There's a state I get in, less and less these days, but in part because of the way my world works and my phone and my computers, I now associate it with plane flights, because nobody can call me and I don't buy internet. It's a state that I only seem to access when reading, and only when reading without distraction for a long period of time. It's very strange, and it is one of my most loved states, where on the one hand, I seem

• 18:52Ezra Klein?

  very focused on the text, at the same time, my thinking becomes expansive and associational, to the point of Proust where the wisdom goes beyond the author and into your own, I seem to get flashes of insight that can unlock whole problems or open whole new avenues for myself. It's meditative but epiphanic, and every time I get off of a plane, I say to myself,

• 19:22Ezra Klein?

  I'm going to do that more. I'm going to do that more. I'm going to sit and I'm going to have quiet time with a book. And this was so valuable. And I got like three months of intellectual work done in four hours and then I don't. And so first, I want to ask you, what is that state? What is happening to me in that place where you enter into this almost fugue state of reading and insight that you were not in when you opened the book?

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Well, first, I'm so glad that you understand your own insight. And I want to give you two completely different perspectives on this. So you and I are going to do what the brain does. We're going to do some heavy duty, interactive associations of two different perspectives on your question. The first one is Aristotle. Aristotle was writing about what makes a good society. And he said, there are three lives to a good society. The first life is the life of productivity and knowledge and accrual of information. The second life that is, and in the Greek sense, leisure, entertainment, one has to have that. But

• 20:38Speaker 01

  he said, the third life that is essential is the life of reflection. He used the word contemplation. Now, that is a perspective, let's call it the Aristotelian perspective, in which the contemplative is going missing. And we don't realize how important it is to insight, just the same thing that you experienced on a plane, writ large, writ across everyone. Where are our best insights? Where are we going to have the space and time? To give that next generation the full sum of our wisdom. So that's the real utilian perspective. The second one is a more cognitive neuroscience one.

• 21:23Speaker 01

  And there was this one amazing set of researchers who were trying to deal with, you know, what's the aha experience? What's the inside experience we have? And what they found was that the brain was activated everywhere, it would seem, all these different regions in this both hemispheres. Well, I find the humor in that actually very helpful in understanding what you are talking about. Because it illustrates that when we reach that state, we are activating all we know and going beyond it. We're making new connections.

• 22:08Speaker 01

  And those new connections are the basis of novel thought. And that's what we want for everyone to have as a piece of what it means to learn to read. It's a mistake done by our educational system that sometimes we are, you know, emphasizing one thing versus another. But we should all share the goal that that reading sanctuary, that innermost landscape, that's where we go when we read our best. And that's what reading gives us. It gives us both our best thoughts, but it also is one of the best forms

• 22:53Speaker 01

  of communication with others' best thoughts. It's communicative and it's solitary. And that's its own miracle.

• 23:26Ezra Klein?

  You ran an interesting experiment. Maybe that's a little bit too grand a word for it, but an interesting test on yourself around this. Tell me about reading Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi again.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  Yes. So before I went to neuroscience, I had two degrees in English and I really thought I would study Complet, especially Rilke, Herman Hesse. It was a grand, grand scheme for my life. And then I discovered the political reality of literacy in a Peace Corps-like thing. Before I made the big switch to see literacy as a basic human right and pursue it to the end of my days, I read Herman Hesse with such love and affection. I read everything. I thought I read everything.

• 24:20Speaker 01

  And Glass Bead Game, Magister Ludi, Glass Perlin Spiel. That was my favorite. It was probably why I got the Nobel Prize for literature. And it represented for me the quest for knowledge. So I decided, since I'm writing and telling everybody else what terrible people they are by not reading books in the way that I think we should, I thought I would test myself by going back to Magister Ludi because I certainly knew the plot and I certainly knew there wasn't going to be any murder or sex or anything else to distract me. I could just immerse myself. And so I did.

• 25:02Speaker 01

  And utterly, completely failed to be able to even read the first part of the book. It felt sluggish. I think I said something like, "Creosote going across my cerebral hemispheres." It was like, how could he have gotten a Nobel Prize? I wouldn't have given a Nobel Prize for this. And I put the book back. So I tried again. I went back, just at a personal peak in myself, and I thought I would try again. And so I only allowed myself to read a few minutes a day for a while. And basically Ezra, what I had to do is slow myself down.

• 25:45Speaker 01

  I thought I was reading online and in print with the same immersive qualities as I had as a English major, but I had lost that. I'd lost my most beloved home and I hadn't known it. So it took about two weeks before I could get the pace necessary that would match the book. I found my home again and then I read it another time. And that was finally the time in which I could remember the pleasure of just deep diving

• 26:26Speaker 01

  into another world and being there with no distraction. But it took real work to recover that Ezra. I had not realized how, how far I had strayed from that form of reading myself.

• 26:43Ezra Klein?

  I wonder if there isn't an answer to what I think is a, should be understood as a quite profound mystery of our age in that. And this is a suspicion I've had for a bit. So we live in this age in which one of the fundamental scarcities of all of human civilization and existence has been lifted, which is information. The amount of information any individual being had access to 100 years ago, to say nothing of a thousand, was so minuscule, so bounded compared to what is possible for us to know now, to share now, to access now. And so you would think, having lifted the constraint on what we can know and what we

• 27:28Ezra Klein?

  can share. That you would see something, economic growth, the depth of our democracies, our societal wisdom and humanness accelerate, right? Something of the early utopian beliefs about the internet would come true. Instead, you look around and growth is not faster than it was 50 years ago. We do not see more wise. Our politics is not more elevated, to say the least. And I think what you're saying, and what I think many people sensed, might be at least a partial explanation.

• 28:09Ezra Klein?

  We made it possible to have so much more information in a way that made it impossible or more difficult to reflect upon and develop insights upon that information. And as such, we increased information but reduced judgment. And so, as you say, we're not passing on our best thoughts, but it's also weirdly why the information we have access to isn't creating some civilization-wide betterment, because it turned out the information was never enough. It's what we did with it, what we thought about it, the connections we made with it,

• 28:49Ezra Klein?

  and we've degraded those capacities at wide scale, even as we've increased connectivity and quantity of what we can know.

• 29:00Speaker 01

  So, the very bombardment, the very volume, is causing people ultimately to go only to the familiar sources of that information. And then they become calcified into thinking in those, if you will, reduced terms, which by and large, this is a term used by many people. Is part of the confirmatory bias characteristic that's happening with information. You go to your familiar source. You don't try on other perspectives. It's too much. So you become, instead of more informed,

• 29:46Speaker 01

  informed only about one particular perspective on that information. You are not using your critical analytic capacities to discern truth. And therefore, you are totally susceptible to miss and disinformation. And ultimately, demagoguery. Everything I have done, which was meant to be an apologia for reading, led me to a darker insight, which is that the very act of reading has become so degraded because of the bombardment of information,

• 30:27Speaker 01

  because of the affordances of the particular medium. And because we have become all, all of us cognitively impatient. We don't want to spend the time.

• 30:42Ezra Klein?

  Let me hold you there because I want to, I want to question the word want. And I want to bring this back in a way to neuroplasticity. You talk at times about the opposite of cognitive impatience, which is cognitive patience. But when we exist in a digital world in particular, that is so constantly assaulting us with novelty. What I understand happens to the mind is it begins to expect and even crave novelty. And so this is one of the places where I have a real fear about myself, about my sons, about my society, that we are training ourselves, are training our minds away from cognitive patience, which isn't just,

• 31:25Ezra Klein?

  maybe it is for some people a virtue, but it's also a capacity. Can you talk a bit about that dimension of it? The part that's not about what we want to do, but about what our brains become used to doing?

• 31:38Speaker 01

  There's a term that people use in this area called the novelty bias. And that's a reflex that goes all the way back to our hunter-gatherer days, in which to see what was unusual was to preserve our life, whether it was a predator that we were able to avoid, or make a strategy to avoid, or whether it's something that we could eat and not be poisoned. But survival itself depended on that novelty reflex. Now, that novelty reflex is now being hyper-stimulated from infancy on.

• 32:23Speaker 01

  And I make a really hard point with my pediatric colleagues like Barry Zuckerman and John Hutton from Cincinnati. All of these people are really trying hard to insist we don't inure our children to distraction and novelty because they are complete victims to the novelty reflex. Anything distracts them, and they are becoming hyper-stimulated. So even though you were talking about cognitive patience being formed,

• 33:03Speaker 01

  I will say it's being malformed, disformed from the start by parents not realizing that these screens are not babysitters, but that they are shaping the demand for attention and novelty in our young.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  So your statement about cognitive patience being a capacity that can be learned is something that I really want to help parents and educators understand. We all have a role to play. We have a role to play in being a model, but we have a role to play in what we expose our children to and how many hours and when. So it's a capacity that I think our educational system of the future and the present has to really figure out, and we haven't figured it out.

• 34:04Ezra Klein?

  I was thinking about this reading your book. So I have two sons, one's one-year-old and one is almost four. And I was thinking about how for my four-year-old, it isn't his distractedness that worries me, it's his focus. And I say this because particularly since he got a brother, screen time rules are not what they once were in my house. And it's not that he's on all the time, but it's so noticeable with a little kid. There is so little he can pay attention to for long periods, except the screen. I was reading in this wonderful newspaper that hosts this podcast, there was a feature

• 34:48Ezra Klein?

  about Cocamelon, which is this show of functionally animated nursery rhymes that like two and three-year-olds love and adults hate. But they talk about in this feature, how they have set up a room, the place that makes Cocamelon, where they will have a kid watching the show and set up next to it is another screen that shows an adult just doing normal household tasks, just sort of wandering around, doing whatever you do in the house. And if the child becomes distracted from Cocamelon by what the adult is doing.

• 35:29Ezra Klein?

  They go back to the edit and they amp up the interestingness, the cuts, the whatever makes a Coca-Cola episode interesting. And it was so dystopic, right? The, the level of engineering, I mean, the hyper saturation of the colors, the constant cuts. And so, I mean, a little bit like, you know, hyper sugary cereal or whatever, what his system is learning defined worth paying attention to, right? And like how hard it is for the world to measure up to that, as it is for me. I'm, I'm going to bring this to me in a second. So don't, I'm not just putting this on little kids. But I know every time I put them there, it is training, right? It is training about what's interesting and what's not.

• 36:13Ezra Klein?

  I mean, in a weird way, like the natural state of the kid should be distracted. I can't have him distracted all the time because I sometimes need to like clean dishes. But it is really unnerving.

• 36:24Speaker 01

  It's unnerving and it's also, there's a certain unconscionable aspect that has happened. And that is that those of us who really believed that, and I know you and I actually believed similarly 10, 12 years ago, that the forces of the good would prevail with this medium and this culture. But what has happened is that profit and other motivations have not just made sure that engagement was taking place, but that the same formula

• 37:04Speaker 01

  that casino gamblers use to give intermittent reinforcement, plus those ways of engagement, so that the child is addicted. But what you said, and I'll return back to your child. Is that he can't focus the same in the ways that you would hope. And that's because he's hyperstimulated. He is being molded. The same things that are making a gambler addicted in a very small way, that's happening with our children. So those of us who are studying this from the neuroscience viewpoint, like John Hutton, we can tell you.

• 37:49Speaker 01

  I can tell you right now what we call the Goldilocks study, where a parent reads a story. The same story is then in an audio form and just heard by the child. This is a three-year-old or a four-year-old. Or it's animated in a screen. Well, you know that they are paying very close attention to that screen. But what you don't know is if you do or look at the activation of the language regions of the brain under all three of those circumstances. Language is being activated most by when a parent or caretaker is reading that same story. The passivity is gone out the window.

• 38:34Speaker 01

  There is an interactive nature to it. And there is a use of their language knowledge and their background knowledge that's coming to bear more forcefully in that print situation and more passively in the screen situation. And so, of course, you have differences in concentration. You have differences in attention. Walter Benjamin said that boredom is the hatch bird of the imagination. Well, our children, the first thing they do after they go off the screen is say, "I'm bored." But this is not Walter Benjamin's boredom.

• 39:19Speaker 01

  This is boredom that seeks to, if you will, assuage its need for hyperstimulation by getting more. This is something that we must figure out.

• 39:33Ezra Klein?

  It's funny, I think there's something almost comforting about putting this on the kids. And I promise I won't spend the whole time we have together on parenting. But this is something that occurred to me in an unpleasant way, reading your chapters about children, which is it's easy to talk about the way kids growing up with modern screens. Like, I grew up with TV. Streaming is totally different because anything can be on at any minute. Like, the iPad is like a whole nother level of engagement for my son. But it's true for the parents, too. I was thinking about how my engagement with screens means that there's always a possibility of something, at least plausibly, really interesting. And kids are often, no offense to them, quite boring.

• 40:18Ezra Klein?

  They need you to sit around doing a lot of things that are not the most engaging thing that I could possibly imagine doing. And I, as a parent, and basically all the parents I know, you know, will sometimes collapse to the screen because I, too, like, am hooked into the novelty. And as such, I am not there playing make-believe, or reading, or whatever it might be. That isn't... The way this acts on children, I guess is what I'm saying, is not just because we put the kids in front of the screens, but because we put the parents want to get back to their screens, too. To the point that now I try, if I go to the playground with them, I don't bring...

• 40:59Ezra Klein?

  I try not to bring my phone unless there's some reason I really need it because I can't stop myself.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 41:06Ezra Klein?

  Which is also very strange.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  You are as addicted as anyone. We all are.

• 41:11Ezra Klein?

  What I'm trying to get at with this question is you were just bringing up how different it is for the child to have the parent's attention. And the parents are inattentive, too. What does that mean for children?

• 41:21Speaker 01

  So, they are being given a constant model. And if you look at children, you'll see that they are, among other things, great imitators. So, one of the more horrifying aspects of that Goldilocks study that I told you, where parents came in and read to their child, or they saw it, well, one of the things that happened was that John Hutton saw some of the parents reading to their child and then turning every 30 seconds to check their email.

• 41:55Speaker 01

  And this was like the perfect example. The very act of being a caretaker, an interactive reader to your child is being disrupted by the addiction of the parent to social media or whatever is on their phone. This is a part of reality that parents need to face in themselves. If we are to model, then we must model not only good uses of technology, but good uses of time itself that isn't devoted or distracted by technology.

• 42:34Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about how we use our phones because there's something a little paradoxical here. On the one hand, we're reading more words than ever. I mean, we're constantly reading words. In some ways, it's a paradise for readers for reading. But this gets a bit at this idea that we talked about at the beginning, that reading is not any one thing. And we mentioned earlier scanning, and I'd also bring into play here scrolling, the fact that the screen moves while you're looking at it. What have you learned in your research and the research of your colleagues about what is different when we're reading in this scanning, scrolling way that phones and screens demand?

• 43:15Speaker 01

  I've been doing a lot of work with colleagues like Naomi Barron, who has an Oxford book called How We Read Now. My colleague's in Norway in the eRead network. And we're all trying to understand what are these characteristics of skimming, scanning, scrolling? And one of the things that is most obvious is that your ability to comprehend and sequence detail when you're skimming or scanning goes out the door. Now, one of the things that goes out the door along with it is called comprehension monitoring.

• 44:00Speaker 01

  Now, when we're reading, let's say, print, by and large, this is not noticeable to yourself. But you're checking. You've gone left, you've gone right, you're always going a little ahead, but you're also going back to check. This comprehension monitoring is not going to be at the fore when what you are doing is in fact trying to get to the end. You are missing monitoring. So you are missing sometimes very important details in a plot or in an essay. So there are several things that contribute to that.

• 44:40Speaker 01

  The first is the speed with which you are accustomed to skimming, scanning, scrolling. Now, remember, the eye movement people are studying this and they're seeing that's what most of us are doing. When you're skimming and scrolling, you can easily just stay at the level of the tip of the iceberg because you are being hastened along, not poised to think about what you're reading.

• 45:12Ezra Klein?

  So it's a bit of an experiment. When I was reading your book, I alternated between reading chapters in the physical book, the paperback, and on my Kindle, which is actually where I do most of my reading. And I love my Kindle because my memory is trash, and I guess we'll talk about that. And the ability to highlight and keep all my highlights centrally located and searchable is really valuable to me. But I did really notice something that you just said when I was reading the book in paper, which is I noticed how much more often I went backwards, how much easier it was and more natural it was somehow to move around in the book. On the Kindle, if I've sort of zoned out on something, it's lost.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  It's gone.

• 45:57Ezra Klein?

  I'm past that. I'm going forward.

• 45:59Speaker 01

  It's ephemeral.

• 46:00Ezra Klein?

  It's not obviously impossible to go back, and sometimes I do. But I noticed how much more often in the book, I moved backwards as well as forwards, or noticed that I had lost attention for a little bit, that there was something about the physicality of it that made moving through the space of it different in ways that I suspect probably did help my comprehension.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  When you ask me where something is in a book, I have a visual sense. It's on the bottom third of the page. It's about a fourth of the way through. And of course, I write all through my book. So. I have a visual spatial image for some of the things that are most important in what I read. And there is no way we do that on screen or audio. And I use both. And I listen to books, but we don't monitor. You can go back. I mean, just as you said, you can go back, but you never do. And so, things go missing. And the things that go

• 47:09Speaker 01

  missing may, in some instances, be the most important facts or details to understanding the plot, or understanding the argument.

• 47:23Ezra Klein?

  But let me take the other side of this, because what I said about the Kindle is also true. Memory is a very weak facility. Now, there's some evidence it's gotten weaker, and you can go back to, I don't, is it Socrates or Aristotle who says that writing is going to be bad, because then we're not going to remember anything?

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Right. The recipe for forgetting.

• 47:45Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, maybe if we never had writing, I'd have an amazing memory, and I wouldn't feel this way. But there are real advantages to digital text. And so, is maybe some of this that we're just in a transition time, you know, it took a long time to figure out how to read, figure out how to do books. For a long time, most people couldn't read, and, you know, books were reserved for the elite. And we are still learning about digital texts, but there are very, very clear advantages. And that as we are able to develop them more deeply, we will, you know, recognize that just as it's better to have writing and reading than to not, it's much, much, much, much better to have these digital worlds than to not. I mean, are you and I just cranky, you know, are we the equivalent of our parents,

• 48:29Ezra Klein?

  who are like, the VCR is too complicated, and it's always distracting me?

• 48:34Speaker 01

  You have often quoted, or have at least recently often quoted McLuhan. And McLuhan's basic protege was this amazing scholar, Walter Ong. And he, I think, said it better than I can. Said, "The problem is not orality, oral culture versus illiterate culture. The problem is figuring out what to do when we are steeped in both." And that's how I conceptualize what I call this hinge moment between the technologies represented rudely by illiterate versus a digital culture.

• 49:18Speaker 01

  There's no going back. We are much better served by thinking about what Ong said. What do we do for those steeped in both? And so my job, as I conceptualize it, is to be not Cassandra's or someone only talking about the negative aspects of digital, but to say, "We must not be ignorant of what we are disrupting or diminishing." And so for almost all my lectures, I end with something that will say, "Preserve as we expand."

• 50:00Speaker 01

  And that's what my goal for others is, to understand what we are disrupting and to figure out ways to build habits of mind, habits of the reading mind, that we can use with purposefulness, whatever medium we're on.

• 50:21Ezra Klein?

  Is part of the issue here that we have operated with the wrong metaphor? So I wonder whether we have gotten into what I think of as the Matrix Jack theory of learning. I have always wanted the thing in the Matrix where they put the little needle in the back of your head into the Jack, and then you know Kung Fu. There are so many books I have sent to people that I want to have read the book. And it took a long time. It's actually Nicholas Carr's book that began to, The Shallows, that began to make me think differently about this, but to realize that it was the time I spent in the book. That really mattered. There was a quote from Sam Bankman-Fried that was making

• 51:06Ezra Klein?

  the rounds, Sam Bankman-Fried being the former head of FTX, this crypto exchange that collapsed. And he says in there that he's very skeptical of books. He thinks mostly books should not be books. They should be six paragraph blog posts. And as somebody who's written both a book and more six paragraph blog posts than I can count, even when the book is expanding on idea that could be shorter, some of its value for the reader is actually the time spent there wrestling. And I wonder if the point to this a little bit isn't that we think much too much about the information we pass on to ourselves or teach children

• 51:43Ezra Klein?

  in schools and not enough about the states that we're spending time in. And as such, the circuits in the mind that we are deepening and strengthening versus letting languish. That like we've gotten too hung up on products as opposed to process.

• 52:03Speaker 01

  I think that you are putting just a beautiful metaphor, if you will, for what's important. And it's not information. We need facts. This is Aristotle's three lies, but we need contemplation and we have forgotten our need for it. But we also need something else. And it's the isotope of knowledge or insight is feeling. That's so important. I've been reading Herman Hesse again. And one of the things he did at the end of his life was write a poem about books. And he said, "All the books in the world will not

• 52:48Speaker 01

  bring you happiness, but build a secret path towards your heart."

• 52:56Speaker 01

  Let's not forget the heart as we battle what is best for the mind. Because the heart, the affective aspect of reading is one of the most beautiful things that leads to that inner sanctuary. But it's part of what happens on the journey to insight. The feelings that we have, the feelings that an author elicits to us, that's a form of knowledge. We need heart and brain as we look at what reading gives us and what we experience when we're reading or not.

• 53:59Ezra Klein?

  I'm going to ask a couple of questions here about ways forward. But one of them is about this. I mean, if you're listening to this conversation and you're thinking, oh, you know, I also have lost some of this faculty. What is the training program to rediscover it look like? What is the, the Mary Ann Wolf plan for refreshing your deep reading skills look like?

• 54:23Speaker 01

  So you might laugh, but I call it bookends. The bookends to a day. And I'm very serious about the two ends of the day. Now with a one and a four year old Ezra, I don't know how I feel guilty telling you this, but I begin my day with meditation and then reading at least 20 minutes of philosophical or theological or spiritual or sometimes political, something that will absolutely

• 55:02Speaker 01

  take me out of myself and center me, completely center my thinking, slow it down. It prepares me for.

• 55:16Speaker 01

  If you will, clearing the deck of whatever detritus from the night or even the day before and readying myself with a particular mindset for whatever the day brings. And then at the end of the day, I do two things that may or may not be helpful to people, especially people with young children. And that is, I have to find a way for the world of imagination to take me away from the work of the day. Sometimes it's films, sometimes it's novels, but it has to be something truly in the world of imagination for me. And then I end that because I don't want to be on a screen at

• 56:01Speaker 01

  the very end of my day. I often end it with some essay by Montaigne. I mean, that sounds really strange, but he was the first essay writer. And those essays are sometimes really funny, sometimes really boring. But whatever they are, they give me a kind of peace that I find in very few places. Wendell Berry, Marcus Aurelius, those are the kinds of people

• 56:38Speaker 01

  who make me feel the peace at the end of the day is something that is really well, well worth striving for. So I end and I begin each day with books.

• 56:55Ezra Klein?

  I'm honestly skeptical of reading practices that are about the end of the day. Maybe it's because I have young kids, as you mentioned, but my reading at the end of the day, I do it. I mean, I fall asleep looking at my Kindle basically every night, but it associates reading with sleep and I don't get anywhere deep with it. In fact, I've had to learn that if I'm going to do real deep reading, it has to be possible sometimes for me to fall asleep for 20 minutes during the day. So I'm actually curious about practices that are not about the end of the day or the beginning of the day, because they're also for a lot of people, those are not plausible times to have the energy to make this a priority. Like, if you really want to do this, in the way that people work out, in the way that they learn a new hobby, if you want to make this part of your week.

• 57:42Ezra Klein?

  To rediscover or retrain yourself as a deep reader, what does it take? Is it just doing it? Is it something more than that? Like, what is the, what is the version of this it is not in the corners of your time?

• 57:56Speaker 01

  That's such a good question for everyone because there are such individual differences about what helps us return to that center, that inner landscape. And I leave it to the individual. I have the advantage of having my children grown. I can do this sort of book ending my day. But the real point isn't the book ending. The real point is to remember, to restore the, what is it? Lorca said, that ancient soul of a child. I think each of us have this busyness that just, we assume we are the indispensable

• 58:42Speaker 01

  managers of our days and times when really we aren't giving ourselves just the tiniest break in being a manager, but rather being just a thinker with a heart and a mind and a soul. And so what I would suggest is if anyone can find a secret place in their day, a secret corner, maybe it's 10 minutes, maybe it's 20, where they can go off, whether it's with a book or with music or with something that will just give them a chance to remember who they are, who their best selves are. That's not a bookend.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  That's finding a corner of the day to refine ourselves. I actually do it with music sometimes instead of reading. I've discovered a composer, a Korean composer named Yi Ruma, and I will play a haunting piece and it will elicit for me something similar. So again, there's these individual differences. Reading leads to this apex, but other things can too.

• 59:55Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask you about another proposal you make in the book. This one more far-reaching, which is the biliterate brain and the ways in which we should be encouraging and explicitly teaching a biliterate brain. What is the biliterate brain?

• 1:00:13Speaker 01

  So I want to actually state that in my work, I'm using the term biliterate in a very particular way to refer to mediums. It begins in a parallel between digital and print exposure, in which in the beginning, print is the medium of choice to surround that child, especially in the zero to two and then two to five period. Digital can be there, but like another teddy bear, not something used as a reward or as a punishment of any sort, neither, but just as something that is part of the environment, the landscape,

• 1:00:57Speaker 01

  never as a babysitter, but that there would be reading every single night to the child from the parents or caretakers, every single night. And then between five and 10, again, print being the dominant medium, but the parallel is that our children, and Reggio, Amelia in Italy just shows how this can happen, they can learn programming and coding and all these wonderful cognitive capacities that go with digital. They can do that simultaneously, but that they're doing parallel tracks.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  They come together when the aspects from digital can be complementary to books and print, but not dominate reading between five and 10. And somewhere between 10 and 12, 13, My hope is that teachers across the world will really have this aim of deep reading processes, of critical analysis and empathy, being at the core of what we teach our children. Tommy Katsir from Israel has this program called Islands of Understanding for that age group, and I so admire her because what she's doing is she's putting literacy

• 1:02:20Speaker 01

  and the study of empathy together. And this is what I really want us to do as we then teach our children to use those deep reading processes on the screen. Again, always asking, what is the purpose? Never using print or digital aimlessly, but purposefully, so that those deep reading skills, the inner sanctuary, is a well-known landscape to the individual child and to us. So I really have a great deal of hope. My colleague Marina Bears in Boston at Boston College talks, and we have had long discussions together,

• 1:03:05Speaker 01

  about the different cognitive capacities that are being advantaged by these different mediums. And we shouldn't be thinking about them as being either in competition or in conflict, but learn them and then learn and teach teachers to help integrate them in whatever reading the child is doing, past 10, when they're fluent, we hope.

• 1:03:33Ezra Klein?

  Let me ask about the other side of this and for adults. So I already asked you how someone might rediscover, retrain their deep reading tendencies. But a lot of us, most of us maybe, are going to and do spend a lot of time staring at a screen, skimming with distractions everywhere. And to the point of the myeloid or brain, there is doubtlessly good in that as well as bad. It's easy to focus, I think, on the bad, but surfing a lot of information, being able to see a lot of different things, picking through things. How do you think about?

• 1:04:16Ezra Klein?

  Doing that well, a suspicion I have, I mentioned earlier that maybe we're just in this lag time. This is all very new. And maybe, you know, we'll look forward 20, 50, 100 years and people will look at us, think, oh, they were terrible at using that. They had no idea what they were doing.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:04:35Ezra Klein?

  In terms of training, using, building, what is good about these functions? How do you think about, or how do you, for yourself, try to manage your digital reading, your digital life, to get the best out of it, as opposed to the worst out of it?

• 1:04:53Speaker 01

  The first thing I do is understand the purpose of whatever I'm reading. Why am I reading this? And there, I would say 60% of my day with the digital reading I do is to find out whether I should or should not do something more. By and large, I don't. But if in the skimming, scrolling that I do like everybody else, I realize this is something I really need to understand, I really need to do something about, then I become a different reader.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  If I don't have access to print, I completely slow myself down. I make sure I'm taking notes and I physically take notes. I am full of notebooks and I know I could use this note taking capacity on the screen. I do not. I find that the actual act, which is also true for children, the grapho motor act helps my memory and consolidation. And so while 60%, I don't do anything differently from anyone else, all those things that I consider important, I either print out or I take very careful notes.

• 1:06:17Speaker 01

  And I am aware, after that experiment, of how vulnerable I am, like everybody else, to the quick skim. When it's useful, great. When it's not useful, then I have to act differently and read differently.

• 1:06:37Ezra Klein?

  So then let me ask you what is always our final question here, which is, what are three books that have influenced you that you would recommend to the audience? I'm sure this one will be very easy for you.

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Oh, this is so horrible. I told Annie that I was not going to obey your rules, but I will try to stay within limits. First is my favorite novelist, American female novelist, and that's Marilynne Robinson. Her Gilead, Home, Lila, Jack, the trilogy Gilead is one of the most beautiful novels, I think, of the 20th century, 2021 century.

• 1:07:15Ezra Klein?

  Yeah, I think Gilead is in my top five books.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  I don't know how many times I've read it. In fact, I was with Marilynne Robinson once in a car and we were reciting Emily Dickinson poems together. And she's just an astonishing, astonishing person. So that's my first. My second is my friend, Gish Jen, who unbelievably can write even about dystopia with a sense of humor and wit. That was in her book, The Resistors. But I would really actually want to say that my favorite was her book, World in Town, in which, like few other people, she helps us understand what it means to be in a different

• 1:08:00Speaker 01

  culture and to have the same goals for humanity, but from a completely different stance. And so those would be two that I suggest. The third will be very difficult for me because it's something between Wendell Berry's Standing By Words and John Donne, the theologian's love's mine, which is Essays on Contemplation. So those three were really hard for me to do, but those are the ones I have come up with.

• 1:08:35Ezra Klein?

  I like that somewhere between three and three and nine, but those are wonderful suggestions.

• 1:08:39Speaker 01

  I know. I didn't say Middlemarch. And my children, if I don't say Middlemarch, will say, Mom, you lied to Ezra Klein. Middlemarch is your favorite book. So I have to say that at the end.

• 1:08:50Ezra Klein?

  I love it. Marian Wolfe, your book is Reader, Come Home. Thank you very much.

• 1:08:56Speaker 01

  Thank you, Ezra. A true pleasure.

• 1:09:11Ezra Klein?

  The Ezra Klein Show is produced by Amafa Agau, Annie Galvin, Jeff Geld, and Rajesh Karma. Fact checking by Michelle Harris, Kate Sinclair. Original music by Isaac Jones, mixing by Jeff Geld, audience strategy by Shannon Busta, and special thanks to Kristen Lin and Kristina Semieluski.