Trouble Reading Novels
I went through a long period, up until just two years ago, when I had a lot of trouble reading books–fiction not non-fiction. The difference being that with fiction you more or less have to read in a linear fashion or you get lost. Sometimes I would put a book down for a few days, or a week, and try to resume. Almost invariably I would have forgotten who the characters and what had happened up to the point I was trying to pick it up again. Non-fiction was different because you don’t have to read in a linear fashion. AS—pointed out in Information Anxiety some decades ago you can jump in anywhere and read until you are bored and then jump somewhere else.
I had come to the conclusion that my ADD was getting worse and I had lost the ability to read long-form narratives. Having read about about a new book, The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains I’m now not so sure about the ADD being the culprit. Author Nicholas Carr says that the Internet has changed our brains to the the point where we can’t concentrate on most deep-thinking tasks without seeking distractions. See The Glove and Mail website here for more about Carr’s thesis.
I feel a bit vindicated that the problem may be our modern world and not the disorder I thought I had wrestled into some form of manageability. One thing I do know, as I am now in the middle of the third novel this year, is that things started to change two years ago. Why then? I was making frequent trips to a lodge in Algonquin Park where the only distractions were the forest, the other guests, the animals, the odd canoe and some of the best cooking I have ever tasted. I did take up my notebook computer and once every evening I would watch a DVD on it. Most of the rest of the time I read novels. I knocked off about four that summer and although I only went up half the time last summer I completed a couple more. Two summers ago those novels were the first I had read to completion in more than a decade. With no distractions it seemed my brain was content to revert to a state where it didn’t require new and novel distractions every couple of minutes.
Now don’t get me wrong I’m not complaining and I don’t think the Internet is the end of the world as we know it. I’m just observing. I’m also aware of a quote from Canada’s premier literary critic Northrup Frye who said,”The book is the most technologically advanced communications medium ever invented because it moves at precisely the speed of the reader.” Frye died before the Internet reached its current level of penetration into our lives. I wonder if he would agree with those words today.
Carr says that long-form narratives are not the way our brains have always worked. To the contrary, according to him we are programed to be easily distracted. He goes on to say that gathering information from Google or other methods on the Internet, take in information from many different sources at a fairly shallow level and the information never makes the transition in our brains from short-term memory to long-term. With print there are no distractions and we get much more information more deeply into the brain and thus into long-term memory. That information can then connect in our brains to other information, other material we have read, or even with our own experience. Using the Internet information is held and manipulated mostly in short-term or working memory but then it is gone or is not available to connect with our own experience or learning. In other words, I guess, we don’t learn at depth.
When asked how he managed to keep from being distracted enough to write the book, Carr said it took him two weeks before he could overcome the panic of not checking his email or other activities on his computer.
What’s my point? Well it comes back to the up side and the down side of neuroplasticity again. If you think reading long-form narratives is a good thing then the Internet can change your brain for the worse. The up side is that you can change back if circumstances, or desires, warrant it.