Wolf, one of the world’s foremost experts on the study of reading, was startled last year to discover her brain was apparently adapting, too.

“The brain is plastic its whole life span,” Wolf said. The brain is the innocent bystander in this new world. There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills. Researchers are working to get a clearer sense of the differences between online and print reading - comprehension, for starters, seems better with paper - and are grappling with what these differences could mean not only for enjoying the latest Pat Conroy novel but for understanding difficult material at work and school. They are battling not just cursory sentence galloping but the constant social network and e-mail temptations that lurk on our gadgets - the bings and dings that interrupt “Call me Ishmael.” Word lovers and scientists have called for a “slow reading” movement, taking a branding cue from the “slow food” movement. adults, according to eMarketer, which tracks digital behavior. Time spent online - on desktop and mobile devices - was expected to top five hours per day in 2013 for U.S. If the rise of nonstop cable TV news gave the world a culture of sound bites, the Internet, Wolf said, is bringing about an eye byte culture. “I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing,” said Maryanne Wolf, a Tufts University cognitive neuroscientist and the author of “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.” This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.”

“It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel.

“I give it a few seconds - not even minutes - and then I’m moving again,” says Handscombe, a 35-year-old graduate student in creative writing at American University.īut it’s not just online anymore. Like a lot of Web surfers, she clicks on links posted on social networks, reads a few sentences, looks for exciting words, and then grows restless, scampering off to the next page she probably won’t commit to. Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online.

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