The research and writing my team has been doing has me thinking about the concept of “deep reading” as presented by Maryanne Wolf in her works, in particular in Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018).
She describes deep reading as a slow, cognitively demanding process that engages multiple regions of the brain in order to analyze, infer, reflect, and empathize. For Wolf, beyond simply decoding words on a page or screen, deep reading is also about constructing meaning through background knowledge, critical thinking, and emotional engagement with a text.
She notes at one point that
“We who are expert readers process and connect our lower-level perceptual information (i.e., the first rings of the reading circuit) at near-breakneck speeds. Only such speeds can enable us to allocate attention to the higher-level deep-reading processes, which in turn constantly feed their conclusions back and forth with the lower-level processes, thus better pre- paring them for the next words they encounter” (37).Later, Wolf explains that
“The formation of the reading-brain circuit is a unique epigenetic achievement in the intellectual history of our species. Within this circuit, deep reading significantly changes what we perceive, what we feel, and what we know and in so doing alters, informs, and elaborates the circuit itself” (68).Related:
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