Why reading and writing on paper can be better for your brain
By Tom Chatfield
My son is 18 months old, and I’ve been reading books with him since he was born. I say “reading”, but I really
mean “looking at” – not to mention holding, dropping, throwing, chewing, and everything else a small human being
likes to do. Over the last six months, though, he has begun not simply to look but also to recognise a few letters and
numbers. He calls a capital D a “dog” after a picture on the door of his room; a capital E is “elephant”; a capital K,
[5] “kangaroo”; and so on.
Reading, differently from speaking, is a young activity in evolutionary terms. Humans have been speaking in
some form for thousands of years; we are born with the ability to acquire speech printed in our neurones. The earliest
writing, however, emerged only 6,000 years ago, and every act of reading remains a version of what my son is
learning: identifying the special species of physical objects known as letters and words, using much the same neural
[10] circuits as we use to identify trees, cars, animals and buses.
It’s not only words and letters that we process as objects. Texts themselves, so far as our brains are concerned,
are physical landscapes. So it shouldn’t be surprising that we respond differently to words printed on a page
compared to words appearing on a screen.
Linguistics professor Naomi Baron conducted a survey of reading preferences among over 300 university
[15] students across the US, Japan, Slovakia and Germany. When given a choice between media ranging from printouts
to smartphones, laptops, e-readers and desktops, 92% of respondents replied that it was a printed copy that best
allowed them to concentrate.
This isn’t a result likely to surprise many editors, or anyone else who works closely with text. While writing this
article, I put my thoughts together through a version of the same principle: after checking my notes onscreen, I printed
[20] them, wrote notes all over the resulting printout, placed exclamation marks next to key points, spread out the result
– and from this landscape I arrived to a – hopefully – coherent argument.
What exactly was going on here? Age and habit played their part. But there is also a growing scientific recognition
that many of a screen’s incomparable advantages – search, unlimited capacity, links and navigation – are either
unhelpful or absolutely destructive when it comes to certain kinds of reading and writing.
[25] A research conducted in 2013 compared the effectiveness of students taking longhand notes versus typing onto
laptops and concluded that the relative slowness of writing by hand demands heavier “mental lifting”, forcing students
to summarise rather than to copy word for word – in turn tending to increase conceptual understanding, application
and retention.
In other words, friction is good – at least so far as memorizing is concerned. Moreover, the textured variety of
[30] physical writing can itself be significant. In a 2012 study at Indiana University, psychologist Karin James tested five
fiveyear-
old children who did not yet know how to read or write. She asked them to reproduce a letter or shape in one
of three ways: typed onto a computer, drawn onto a blank sheet, or traced over a dotted drawing. When the children
were drawing freehand, an MRI* scan during the test showed activation across areas of the brain associated in adults
with reading and writing. The other two methods showed no such activation.
[35] It seems to me that we must abandon the notion that there is only one way of reading, or that technology and
paper are engaged in some implacable war. I can’t imagine teaching my son to read in a house without any physical
books, pens or paper. But I can’t imagine denying him the limitless words and worlds a screen can bring to him either.
I hope I can help him learn to make the most of both – and to type/copy/paste/sketch/scribble precisely as much as
he needs to make each idea his own.
__________
* MRI [Magnectic Resonance Imaging]: Tomografia por Ressonância Magnética
Disponível em:<http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/feb/23/reading-writing-on-paper-better-for-brain-concentration>.Acesso em: 4 mar. 15. (Parcial e adaptado.)
Assinale a alternativa cujos elementos melhor substituem os termos sublinhados nos segmentos a seguir.
I Over the last six months, though, he has begun not simply to look but also to recognise a few letters (linha 03).
II So it shouldn’t be surprising that we respond differently to words (linha 12).