up:: Content
author:: Hugh McGuire
full title:: Why Can’t We Read Anymore?
url: Link
Highlights
- When the people at the New Yorker can’t concentrate long enough to listen to a song all the way through, how are books to survive?
- One time I was reading on my phone while my older daughter, the four-year-old, was trying to talk to me. I didn’t quite hear what she had said, and in any case, I was reading an article about North Korea. She grabbed my face in her two hands, pulled me towards her. “Look at me,” she said, “when I’m talking to you.”
- New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.
- The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush.
- This suppressing of the self is a kind of meditation too — and while books have always been important to me on their own (pre-digital) merits, it started to occur to me that “learning how to read books again,” might also be a way to start weaning my mind away from this dopamine-soaked digital detritus, this meaningless wash of digital information, which would have a double benefit: I would be reading books again, and I would get my mind back.
- Being in a situation where you are trying to concentrate on a task, and an e-mail is sitting unread in your inbox, can reduce your effective IQ by 10 points. (The Organized Mind, by Daniel J Levitin)
- It takes more energy to shift your attention from task to task. It takes less energy to focus. That means that people who organize their time in a way that allows them to focus are not only going to get more done, but they’ll be less tired and less neurochemically depleted after doing it.
- I cannot read books because my brain has been trained to want a constant hit of dopamine, which a digital interruption will provide
- This digital dopamine addiction means I have trouble focusing: on books, work, family and friends
- Those who read own the world, and those who watch television lose it. (Werner Herzog)
- No more Twitter, Facebook, or article reading during the work day (hard)
- No reading of random news articles (hard)
- No smartphones or computers in the bedroom (easy)