Neil Mullarkey

Released on this day in 1980

A neuroscientist who spent 20 years proving that reading on screens damages your brain sat down to read her favorite novel and discovered that the damage had already happened to her. Her name is Maryanne Wolf. She runs the Center for Dyslexia at UCLA and is one of the most cited reading scientists alive. The experiment she ran on herself is sitting inside a book she published in 2018. Here is the one fact that breaks how most people think about reading. Humans were never born to read. Yes, you read that right. There is no reading center in the brain. There is no gene for literacy. Every reader builds a custom circuit inside their own skull by repurposing brain regions that originally evolved for vision, language, and recognizing objects. Wolf calls it the reading brain circuit. The circuit is not a given. It is built by use. And because it is built by use, it can be unbuilt by disuse. The circuit she spent her career mapping is not the one that just turns letters into sounds. Sitting on top of that is something she calls the deep reading circuit. Both hemispheres firing. Multiple lobes coordinating. The visual system, the language regions, the memory centers, the emotional and motor systems all firing in a choreographed sequence that takes the brain a few seconds longer to run than skimming does. Those few extra seconds are where everything important happens. Background knowledge pulls up. Analogies form. Inferences fire. The mind takes the perspective of the character. Critical analysis runs in the background while emotion runs in the foreground. New thoughts get generated on top of the author's thoughts. The decoding is the entry ticket. The deep circuit is the show. Skimming does not fire this circuit. There is no time. In 2018 Wolf ran a private experiment on herself. She decided to reread Hermann Hesse's Magister Ludi, a dense novel she had loved as a young woman. She was the world's leading expert on the reading brain. She assumed her own circuit was intact. It was not. She opened the book and could not get through it. Her words, not mine. She wrote that she hated the book. The sentences felt like snakelike constructions that confuse meaning instead of revealing it. 6She described the experience as someone pouring thick molasses over her brain every time she picked it up. She wrote one sentence that should haunt anyone who reads it. "I now read on the surface and very quickly, in fact, I read too fast to comprehend deeper levels." The woman who built her entire career on the deep reading circuit had quietly lost access to her own. The mechanism is brutal in how simple it is. Eye-tracking research from Ziming Liu at San Jose State shows that when people read on screens, almost all of them fall into the same pattern. They read the first line. Then their eyes word-spot down the page in an F shape. They sample. They do not read. Whatever you stop using, your brain stops maintaining. The data is the part most people have never seen. In 2018 Pablo Delgado ran a meta-analysis of 54 studies covering more than 170,000 participants. Same text. Half on paper. Half on screen. The screen group lost by 0.21 standard deviations. Replicated by Clinton at 0.25. Replicated by Kong at 0.21. Researchers gave it a name. They call it the screen inferiority effect. The worst part is what happened over time. The gap has grown larger in studies done after 2010, not smaller. Digital natives do not outperform older readers. They underperform them on the same texts. More exposure makes it worse, not better. Screen readers are also more confident they understood than paper readers. They think they got more out of the text than they actually did. The skimmer does not know they are skimming. They believe they are reading. The stakes Wolf keeps coming back to are not academic. The deep reading circuit is the same circuit your brain uses to take another person's perspective. To weigh complex civic information. To read a contract, a ballot question, a medical disclosure and notice what is actually being said underneath what is written. If the circuit atrophies, those capacities go with it. Not metaphorically. Structurally. You are not getting dumber. You are not losing intelligence. You are quietly losing access to a specific circuit that takes longer to fire than your phone is willing to wait for. The expert who spent 20 years warning the world ran the experiment on herself and barely made it back. Most people are not running the experiment at all.

Top of the Pops (22nd May 1980). Jona Lewie is at number 27 with You'll Always Find Me In The Kitchen At Parties.

Good morning.

30 years ago today we played 'Sense' live on TFI Friday with our friend Terry Hall.

The Comedy Playhouse pilot of All Gas and Gaiters was broadcast on this day in 1966. Starring Robertson Hare, William Mervyn, John Barron and Derek Nimmo, four series were broadcast between 1966 and 1971. Including this pilot, 11 episodes survive from the 33 made.