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r- Kanton aKindle?
v- THE TECHNOLOGY
OF the book-sheafs
of paper covered in
squiggles of ink- has
remained virtually un-
changed shce Guten-
berg. This is largely a testament to
the effectiveness of books as a means
at of transmitting and storing informa-
or tion. Paper is cheap, and ink endures.
i-
In recent years, however, tie act of
if reading has undergone a rapid trans-
formation, as deirices such as the Kin-
dle and iPad account for a growing
share of book sales. (Amazon, for in-
stance, now sells more e-books than
hardcovers.) Before long, we will do
most of our reading on
screens-lovely, luminous screens.
The displays are one of the main
ef- selling points of these new literary
gadgets. Thanks to dramatic improve-
cit ments in screen resolution, the words
i- shimmer on the glass; every letter is
precisely defined, with fully adjust-
Ld able fonts. Think of it as a beautifully
printed book that,s always available in
ltO perfect light. For contrast and clarity,
it's hard for Gutenberg to compete.
And these reading screens are
bound to get better. One of the long-
standing trends of modern technology
is to make it easier and easier to pei-
;ed ceive fine-grained content. The num-
m- ber of pixels in televisions has in-
creased fivefotd in the last l0 years,
I VHS gave rise to the Blu-Ray, and
lf, computer monitors can display mil_
lions of vibrant colors.
I would be the last to complain
ter about such improvements-I shudder
to imagine a world without spolts on
HDTV-but it's worth considering the
ways in which these new reading
technologies may change the nature
of reading and, ultimately, the content
of our books.
Let's begin by looking at how read-
ing happens in the brain. Stanislas
Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the Col-
ldge de France in paris, has helped to
demonstrate that the literate brain
contains two distinct pathways for
making sense ofwords, each activated
in different conterts. One pathway,
knor,rm as the ventral route, is direct
and efficient: We see a group of let-
ters, convert those letters into a word
and then directly grasp the word,s
Do we really want
reading to be as
effortless as possible?
meaning. When you,re reading a
straightforward senience in a clear
format, you're almost certainly rely-
ing on this neural highway. As a re-
sult the act of reading seems effort_
less. We don,t have to think about the
words on the page.
But the ventral route is not the
only way to read. The brain,s second
reading pathway, the dorsal stream, is
turned on when we have to pay con-
scious attention to a sentence. per-
haps we've encountered an obscure
word or a patch of smudged ir*. (tn
his experiments, Mr. Dehaene acti-
vates this pathway in a variety of
ways, such as rotating the letters or
filling the prose with errant punctua-
tion.) Although scientists had previ-
ously assumed that the dorsal route
ceased to be active once we became
Iiterate, Mr, Dehaene,s research dem-
onstrates that even adults are still
forced to occasionally decipher a text.
The lesson of his research is that
the act of reading observes a gradient
of awareness, Familiar sentences ren-
E
dered on lucid e-ink screens are read l
quickly and effortlessly. Unusual sen-
tences with complex clauses and odd
punctuation tend to require *o.e conl
scious effort, which leads to more ac_
tivation in the dorsal pathway. All the
extra cognitive work wakes us up; we
read more slowly, but we notice more.
Psychologists call this the ',levels-of_
processing" effect, since sentences
that require extra levels of analysis
are more likely to get remembered.
, E-readers have yet to dramatically
alter the reading experience; e-ink
still feels a lot like old-fashioned ink.
But it seems inevitable that the same
trends that have transformed our
televisions will also affect our reading
gadgets. And this is where the prob_
lems begin. Do we really want reading
to be as effortless as possible? The
neuroscience of literacy suggests that,
sometimes, the best way to make
sense of a difficult text is to read it in
a difficult format, to force our brain .
to slow down and process each word. '
After all, reading isn,t about ease_it,s
about understanding. Ifwe,re going to
read Kant on the Kindle, or proust on.
the iPad, then we should at least ex_
periment with an ugly font.
Every medium eventually influ_
ences the message that it carries. I
worry that, before long we,ll become
so used to the mindless clarity of e_
ink that the technology will feed back
onto the content, making us less will_
ing to endure challenging texts. We,ll
forget what it's like to flex those dor-
sal muscles, to consciously decipher a
thorny stretch ofprose. And that
would be a shame, because not every
sentence should be easy to read.
Jonah Lehrer is the author, most re-
cently, of "How We Decide.t' His col_
umn will appear every other week.