When reading a printed page or even a whole book, you tend to know where you are. Speed isn’t the only problem with reading on screens. It also won’t get you far if you’re preparing for a test on the periodic table. That’s not helpful if you’re trying to understand the themes in that classic book, To Kill a Mockingbird. Your brain might fire up the networks it uses for skimming quickly through TikTok posts. Imagine that you turn on your phone to read an assignment for school. That fast skimming, she says, can become a habit associated with reading on-screen. “Their eyes scan the pages and the words faster than if they’re reading on a piece of paper.”īut when reading fast, we may not absorb all the ideas as well. So, “when people read on-screen, they read faster,” says Alexander at the University of Maryland. Much of what we read on-screen tends to be text messages and social-media posts. If we think it will be easy, we might not put in much effort. She says one way mindset works is in anticipating how easy or hard we expect the reading to be. Baron is the author of How We Read Now, a new book about digital reading and learning. She works at American University in Washington, D.C. Baron is a scientist who studies language and reading. It also depends on what you assume about the text. That doesn’t just depend on the device, however. But when screens are small, the extra scrolling needed to read a long article or book may make it harder to retain what you’re reading, data now show. That’s fine for checking texts and social media posts. It may switch to deep-reading mode when you turn to print. Same original tool, two very different forms.Īs a result, the brain might slip into skim mode when you’re reading on a screen. This is like if you took a coat hanger and instead of straightening it out to fetch a blueberry, you twisted it into a hook to unclog a drain. It basically adapts the same tool again for the new task. When we read online, the brain creates a different set of connections between cells from the ones it uses for reading in print. But that flexibility can be a problem when it comes to reading different types of texts. It’s one reason we can learn to do so many new things. It’s great that the brain is so flexible. That’s what the brain does when you read. You’ve taken a tool made for one thing and adapted it for something new. But if a blueberry rolls under the refrigerator, you might straighten out the coat hanger and use it to reach under the fridge and pull out the fruit. For example, a coat hanger is great for putting your clothes in the closet. This is similar to how you might adapt a tool for some new use. For example, the part that evolved to recognize faces is called into action to recognize letters. To understand text, the brain borrows networks that evolved to do other things. Wolf notes it’s because the brain has no special network of cells just for reading. We learn to talk by listening to those around us. This neuroscientist specializes in how the brain reads. Maryanne Wolf works at the University of California, Los Angeles. When tested, though, it turns out that they actually learned less than when reading in print. Alexander says students often think they learn more from reading online. Much of her research has delved into the differences between reading in print and on-screen. Patricia Alexander is a psychologist at the University of Maryland in College Park. The researchers shared the results in Educational Research Review. Comprehension, they found, was better overall when people read print rather than digital texts. Their 2018 study involved more than 171,000 readers. For example, researchers in Spain and Israel took a close look at 54 studies comparing digital and print reading. Even worse, many don’t realize they’re not getting it. Many studies have shown that when people read on-screen, they don’t understand what they’ve read as well as when they read in print. Or at least that’s what a lot of research now suggests. But if you really need to learn something, you’re probably better off with print. Need a quick refresher on the phases of the moon? Go ahead, read a story online (or two or three). Want to know the current population of India? The internet is your best bet.
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