I am going through a personal crisis. I used to love reading.
I am writing this blog in my office, surrounded by 27 tall bookcases laden with 5,000 books.
Over the years I have read them, marked them up, and recorded the annotations in a computer database for potential references in my writing.
To a large degree, they have formed my professional and spiritual life.
Books help define who I am.
They have ushered me on a journey of faith, have introduced me to the wonders of science and the natural world, have informed me about issues such as justice and race.
More importantly, they have been a source of delight and adventure and beauty, opening windows to a reality I would not otherwise know.
Crisis
My crisis consists in the fact that I am describing my past, not my present.
I used to read three books a week.
One year I devoted an evening each week to read all of Shakespeare’s plays (Okay, due to interruptions it actually took me two years). Another year I read the major works of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
But I am reading many fewer books these days, and even fewer of the kinds of books that require hard work.
The Internet and social media have trained my brain to read a paragraph or two, and then start looking around.
When I read an online article from the Atlantic or the New Yorker, after a few paragraphs I glance over at the slide bar to judge the article’s length.
My mind strays, and I find myself clicking on the sidebars and the underlined links.
Soon I’m over at CNN.com reading Donald Trump’s latest tweets and details of the latest terrorist attack, or perhaps checking tomorrow’s weather.
Worse, I fall prey to the little boxes that tell me, “If you like this article [or book], you’ll also like…” Or I glance at the bottom of the screen and scan the teasers for more engaging tidbits: 30 Amish Facts That’ll Make Your Skin Crawl; Top 10 Celebrity Wardrobe Malfunctions; Walmart Cameras Captured These Hilarious Photos.
A dozen or more clicks later I have lost interest in the original article.
An explanation
Neuroscientists have an explanation for this phenomenon.
When we learn something quick and new, we get a dopamine rush; functional-MRI brain scans show the brain’s pleasure centers lighting up.
In a famous experiment, rats keep pressing a lever to get that dopamine rush, choosing it over food or sex. In humans, emails also satisfy that pleasure center, as do Twitter and Instagram and Snapchat.
Nicholas Carr’s book “The Shallows” analyzes the phenomenon, and its subtitle says it all: “What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.”
Carr spells out that most Americans, and young people especially, are showing a precipitous decline in the amount of time spent reading.
He says, “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.” Continue reading
- Philip Yancey is the author of several books, including “The Jesus I Never Knew” and “What’s So Amazing About Grace?”
- Image: Washington Post
