E-books versus paper books.  Normally I try not to link to NYT since most blog readers are probably reading it already, but this was an extremely pertinent debate.  Wish they had included a voice about never giving 250 million African children a chance to read books if governments and donors are encouraged to jump straight to electronics.  The e-book lobbyists no doubt are working hard on that, and the African publishing industry has no one to represent them at all.  Guess what the outcome is likely to be? 

PS. I love the computer scientist guy who writes "technology is neutral (as usual)" with no attempt even to explain what a statement like that could possibly mean.  Yes, the tornado destroyed your home, but it was a neutral tornado.  He then chides students about writing badly because they are used to texting, but himself uses the "(as usual)" construction twice... Snark is free here, btw.

An extract from the contribution of Maryanne Wolf author of Proust and the Squid:The Story and Science of the Reading Brain:

I have no doubt that the new mediums will accomplish many of the goals we have for the reading brain, particularly the motivation to learn to decode, read and experience the knowledge that is available. As a cognitive neuroscientist, however, I believe we need rigorous research about whether the reading circuit of our youngest members will be short-circuited, figuratively and physiologically. For my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now,perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).

Flexible Learning of Multiple Speech Structures in Bilingual Infants
Ágnes Melinda Kovács* and Jacques Mehler

Children acquire their native language according to a well-defined time frame. Surprisingly, although children raised in bilingual environments have to learn roughly twice as much about language as their monolingual peers, the speed of acquisition is comparable in monolinguals and bilinguals. Here, we show that preverbal 12-month-old bilingual infants have become more flexible at learning speech structures than monolinguals. When given the opportunity to simultaneously learn two different regularities, bilingual infants learned both, whereas monolinguals learned only one of them. Hence, bilinguals may acquire two languages in the time in which monolinguals acquire one because they quickly become more flexible learners.

So I had a simulation running in my head Sunday night, when I stayed up until 2am reading the excellent Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins, a very nice sci-fi dystopia for pre-teens, but works well as light entertainment for adults too. Elliot liked all the fighting, but I thought the emotional complexity of the main character was nicely drawn.

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2009) — A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

Nicole Speer, lead author of this study, says findings demonstrate that reading is by no means a passive exercise. Rather, readers mentally simulate each new situation encountered in a narrative. Details about actions and sensation are captured from the text and integrated with personal knowledge from past experiences. These data are then run through mental simulations using brain regions that closely mirror those involved when people perform, imagine, or observe similar real-world activities.

Read more...

Why An Exciting Book Is Just As Thrilling As A Hair-raising Movie

ScienceDaily (Aug. 18, 2008)

"We placed our participants in an fMRI scanner to measure their brain activity while we first showed our subject short 3s movie clips of an actor sipping from a cup and then looking disgusted," said Christian Keysers. "Later on, we asked them to read and imagine short emotional scenarios; for instance, walking along a street, bumping into a reeking, drunken man, who then starts to retch, and realizing that some of his vomit had ended up in your own mouth. Finally, we measured their brain activity while the participants tasted unpleasant solutions in the scanner."

"Our striking result," said Keysers, "is that in all three cases, the same location of the anterior insula lit up. The anterior insula is the part of the brain that is the heart of our feeling of disgust. Patients who have damage to the insula, because of a brain infection for instance, lose this capacity to feel disgusted. If you give them sour milk, they would drink it happily and say it tastes like soda."

Prof. Keysers continued, "What this means is that whether we see a movie or read a story, the same thing happens: we activate our bodily representations of what it feels like to be disgusted– and that is why reading a book and viewing a movie can both make us feel as if we literally feel what the protagonist is going through."

In a world that is increasingly dominated by visual media, added Keysers, this finding is good news for the written media, in particular: reading a good book or an exciting newspaper article really can feel as emotionally vivid as watching a movie.

Read whole article...

Readers Build Vivid Mental Simulations Of Narrative Situations

ScienceDaily (Feb. 5, 2009) — A new brain-imaging study is shedding light on what it means to "get lost" in a good book — suggesting that readers create vivid mental simulations of the sounds, sights, tastes and movements described in a textual narrative while simultaneously activating brain regions used to process similar experiences in real life.

Read whole article...

Clearly the technology is converging (e.g. Kindle) and it will only be a decade before there is digital paper. But for right now, the issue is relevant.

Storybooks On Paper Better For Children Than Reading Fiction On Computer Screen, According to Expert
ScienceDaily (Dec. 22, 2008)

"Swedish researchers believe we understand more and better when reading on paper than when we read the same text on a screen. We avoid navigating and the small things we don't think about, but which subconsciously takes attention away from the reading. Also texts on a screen are often not adapted to the screen format. The most important difference is when the text becomes digital. Then it loses its physical dimension, which is special to the book, and the reader loses his feeling of totality."

Mangen has mainly been looking at hypertext stories. These stories exploit the multimedia possibilities of a computer and use both hypertext, video, sound, pictures and text. They are constructed in such a way that clicking one's way around them comes close to a literary computer game.

As a researcher, Mangen is interested in the physical aspect of reading and applies theories from psychology and phenomenology linked to the relationships between motor functions and attention in order to highlight the difference between reading a novel and a hypertext story.

"The digital hypertext technology and its use of multimedia are not open to the experience of a fictional universe where the experience consists of creating your own mental images. The reader gets distracted by the opportunities for doing something else," Mangen says.

Read more...

Continuing my reading (previous post) of the collected speeches of Thomas Sankara, today I read the famous 1983 "Speech of Political Orientation" (Discours d'orientation politique) that intellectual Burkinabè still know of today, 25 years later. Supposedly, the speech was written by Valère Somé, whom I happened to meet this summer, ever so briefly! Well, mostly I overhead him "discoursing" in the hallway while I was coding survey responses... I didn;t get up to wander over and engage. How's that for revealing where I stand? My PhD mentors (and still much admired) Michael Watts and Pranab Bardhan will be shuddering if they ever read my callousness. Well, young revolutionaries never really inspired me. Almost always provoked a yawn more than an accelerated heartbeat. Hmm, have to re-examine my Durruti fixation in the light of that comment.

Anyway, and apropos of this blog, the interesting part in the speech is the emphasis placed on self-education and moral reform through reading. The young intellectuals of the revolution wanted everyone to be like themselves, reading and debating exciting works. They had absorbed a lot of Marxist-inspired readings, and it shows clearly in the speech. All that reading finally got turned into writing that mattered.

The more I think about it the more the speech reflects a certain kind of modernization ideology, where bringing material prosperity relies on transformation of the self. You have to want to work hard, honestly, and together for realization of the dream. Reading lots of books will help you do that. So then the interesting question is: Is that right? How much truth might there be in the whole "changing values" hypothesis? There are some development economists who work on this, and I'll try to come back to their work in another post, after I get a chance to see whether any of them mention reading itself as a way that certain values are brought into play.

I'll write more on the speech proper demain.

From the article:
Reading Museveni: Structure, Agency and Pedagogy in Ugandan Politics, Ronald Kassimir, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 33, No. 2/3, Special Issue: French-Speaking Central Africa: Political Dynamics of Identities and Representations (1999), pp. 649-673

Anyone the least bit familiar with Museveni's writings and speeches knows that here is a soldier that reads, and reads....

Why the dot-dot-dot? Like Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the blood-thirsty rabbit's Cave of Caerbannog"? Argh, I can't access JSTOR from home... Have to wait until tomorrow to find out what he reads. But the imagination is so fertile. Poetry? No. The Bible? Yes, but that's not what Kassimir has in mind I'm sure. Veterinary tracts on cattle ranching? No again. Danielle Steel? Hard to imagine. What does such a person actually read, and how does it change him?

What does reading do? This time a really interesting article, because by someone who actually knows what they are doing, though a little uncritical... An extract:

How to Read Like a President

... I just finished five years of work on Jackson and his White House years, and I found that the reconstruction of his literary interests, from youth to old age, illuminated much about the arrangement of his intellectual furniture. His heroic sense of possibility? He loved Jane Porter’s novel “The Scottish Chiefs.” His thunderous rhetorical habit of posing a question and then answering it? He grew up memorizing the Westminster Shorter Catechism of the Presbyterian Church. His provincial obsession with manners, bearing and etiquette? He was a fan of Lord Chesterfield’s letters. His reflexive characterization of enemies like Henry Clay as “Judases” and his dependence on imagery from the Old Testament? He cherished the Bible and his late wife’s copy of Isaac Watts’s translation of the Psalms. His shrewd political sense? He was an unlikely admirer of the French philosopher Fénelon’s “Telemachus,” a kind of Machiavellian guide to ruling wisely.

You can tell a lot about a president — or a presidential candidate — by what he reads, or says he reads. We know the iconic examples: George Washington and his rules of civility, Thomas Jefferson and the thinkers of the French and Scottish Enlightenments, Lincoln and the Bible and Shakespeare. Though a generation apart, Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt both loved Alfred Thayer Mahan’s “Influence of Sea Power Upon History” and savored the imperial poems of Kipling. Together such works created a kind of Anglo-American ethos in their minds — an ethos Franklin Roosevelt would make concrete during World War II, when he and Winston Churchill quoted Edward Lear’s nonsense rhymes to each other as they fought Hitler and Japan. Full article here....

Frank J. Hakemulder
Utrecht University

Literature has often been considered as a valuable source of information about the human psyche. Palmer (1992), for instance, argues that reading literary texts acquaints us with the experience of being someone else. Rorty (1989) suggested that reading novels enriches our moral awareness, because during the reading experience we find ourselves in shoes of a wide diversity of people. Thus, we get better and better at understanding moral situations from different points of view.

In a series of experiments it was examined whether reading a story colour readers’ perception of unfamiliar outgroup members. Participants, Dutch students, either read a story describing the experiences of an Algerian woman or a control text. Afterwards they responded to statements assessing their beliefs about Algerian women in general. Results indicated that readers’ perception was indeed biased by the story. Follow-up studies suggested that such effects may be significantly stronger for stories than for a non-narrative representation of similar information.

Full paper is here.

A fascinating summary from the Am. Psychological Association of some recent reading research in terms of the brain...

Reading research has made significant progress over the past 30 years, accelerating in the last few years as researchers who do intervention collaborate with brain-imaging researchers. Many studies over the last three decades have confirmed that reading has more to do with mentally “hearing” letter sounds and words than with seeing them, thus making it clear that children with reading problems are not lazy or unintelligent. Instead, they have specific brain-based differences in how they process information.

By using brain images to study reading, psychologists and their colleagues in medicine and education have found a biological explanation for the 2004 finding that research-based teaching can significantly improve how students with dyslexia read and spell. And in another 2004 study, they found evidence that effective instruction normalizes brain function.

The 2005 study showed that children who might otherwise have trouble learning to read can be identified and taught before their reading problems are apparent. When taught, their brains will change in as little as a year. This news is encouraging: Most kids who are at risk for reading problems can still learn to read.

More is available here. My own curiosity lies not in how the brains of readers experiencing difficulties reading are different from "normal" readers, but rather how the experience of sustained reading itself, a novel every month, might change the brain's ability to process information. Does it?