One day in the 1980s, I sat in the front row in my first undergraduate anthropology class, eager to learn more about this bizarre and fascinating species I was born into. But I got more than I expected that day as I heard for the first time that biological races are not real.

Adding RFID tags to expensive pieces of equipment to help track their location was one of the first IoT applications. But since then, the cost of adding sensors and an internet connection to objects has continued to fall, and experts predict that this basic functionality could one day cost as little as 10 cents, making it possible to connect nearly everything to the internet.

The term IoT is mainly used for devices that wouldn't usually be generally expected to have an internet connection, and that can communicate with the network independently of human action. For this reason, a PC isn't generally considered an IoT device and neither is a smartphone -- even though the latter is crammed with sensors. A smartwatch or a fitness band or other wearable device might be counted as an IoT device, however.

Pretty much any physical object can be transformed into an IoT device if it can be connected to the internet to be controlled or communicate information. A lightbulb that can be switched on using a smartphone app is an IoT device, as is a motion sensor or a smart thermostat in your office or a connected streetlight. An IoT device could be as fluffy as a child's toy or as serious as a driverless truck. Some larger objects may themselves be filled with many smaller IoT components, such as a jet engine that's now filled with thousands of sensors collecting and transmitting data back to make sure it is operating efficiently. At an even bigger scale, smart cities projects are filling entire regions with sensors to help us understand and control the environment. 

The Internet of Things, or IoT, refers to the billions of physical devices around the world that are now connected to the internet, all collecting and sharing data. Thanks to the arrival of super-cheap computer chips and the ubiquity of wireless networks, it's possible to turn anything, from something as small as a pill to something as big as an aeroplane, into a part of the IoT. Connecting up all these different objects and adding sensors to them adds a level of digital intelligence to devices that would be otherwise dumb, enabling them to communicate real-time data without involving a human being. The Internet of Things is making the fabric of the world around us more smarter and more responsive, merging the digital and physical universes.

In response to questions sent via email, a spokesperson for the foundation said that a “guiding principle” of its journalism funding is “ensuring creative and editorial independence.” The spokesperson also noted that, because of financial pressures in journalism, many of the issues the foundation works on “do not get the in-depth, consistent media coverage they once did.… When well-respected media outlets have an opportunity to produce coverage of under-researched and under-reported issues, they have the power to educate the public and encourage the adoption and implementation of evidence-based policies in both the public and private sectors.”

but even these efforts have drawn expert detractors who say that Gates may actually be introducing harm, or distracting us from more important, lifesaving public health projects.

From virtually any of Gates’s good deeds, reporters can also find problems with the foundation’s outsize power, if they choose to look. But readers don’t hear these critical voices in the news as often or as loudly as Bill and Melinda’s. News about Gates these days is often filtered through the perspectives of the many academics, nonprofits, and think tanks that Gates funds. Sometimes it is delivered to readers by newsrooms with financial ties to the foundation.

During the pandemic, news outlets have widely looked to Bill Gates as a public health expert on covid—even though Gates has no medical training and is not a public official. PolitiFact and USA Today (run by the Poynter Institute and Gannett, respectively—both of which have received funds from the Gates Foundation) have even used their fact-checking platforms to defend Gates from “false conspiracy theories” and “misinformation,” like the idea that the foundation has financial investments in companies developing covid vaccines and therapies. In fact, the foundation’s website and most recent tax forms clearly show investments in such companies, including Gilead and CureVac. 

Gates’s generosity appears to have helped foster an increasingly friendly media environment for the world’s most visible charity. Twenty years ago, journalists scrutinized Bill Gates’s initial foray into philanthropy as a vehicle to enrich his software company, or a PR exercise to salvage his battered reputation following Microsoft’s bruising antitrust battle with the Department of Justice. Today, the foundation is most often the subject of soft profiles and glowing editorials describing its good works. 

The foundation even helped fund a 2016 report from the American Press Institute that was used to develop guidelines on how newsrooms can maintain editorial independence from philanthropic funders. A top-level finding: “There is little evidence that funders insist on or have any editorial review.” Notably, the study’s underlying survey data showed that nearly a third of funders reported having seen at least some content they funded before publication.

I recently examined nearly twenty thousand charitable grants the Gates Foundation had made through the end of June and found more than $250 million going toward journalism. Recipients included news operations like the BBC, NBC, Al Jazeera, ProPublica, National Journal, The Guardian, Univision, Medium, the Financial Times, The Atlantic, the Texas Tribune, Gannett, Washington Monthly, Le Monde, and the Center for Investigative Reporting; charitable organizations affiliated with news outlets, like BBC Media Action and the New York Times’ Neediest Cases Fund; media companies such as Participant, whose documentary Waiting for “Superman” supports Gates’s agenda on charter schools; journalistic organizations such as the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, the National Press Foundation, and the International Center for Journalists; and a variety of other groups creating news content or working on journalism, such as the Leo Burnett Company, an ad agency that Gates commissioned to create a “news site” to promote the success of aid groups. In some cases, recipients say they distributed part of the funding as subgrants to other journalistic organizations—which makes it difficult to see the full picture of Gates’s funding into the fourth estate. 

NPR’s funding from Gates “was not a factor in why or how we did the story,” reporter Pam Fessler says, adding that her reporting went beyond the voices quoted in her article. The story, nevertheless, is one of hundreds NPR has reported about the Gates Foundation or the work it funds, including myriad favorable pieces written from the perspective of Gates or its grantees.

If you squint as you read the story, you’ll notice that every quoted expert is connected to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which helps fund the project. And if you’re really paying attention, you’ll also see the editor’s note at the end of the story, which reveals that NPR itself receives funding from Gates.

Last August, NPR profiled a Harvard-led experiment to help low-income families find housing in wealthier neighborhoods, giving their children access to better schools and an opportunity to “break the cycle of poverty.” According to researchers cited in the article, these children could see $183,000 greater earnings over their lifetimes—a striking forecast for a housing program still in its experimental stage.

While the plot of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for instance, is “nested and complicated,” they wrote, “the emotional arc associated with each sub-narrative is clearly visible.” (That said, emotional moments discussed briefly—the first kiss between Harry and Ginny, let’s say—didn’t register.)

Then, they ran their dataset through a sentiment analysis to generate an emotional arc for each work. “We’re not imposing a set of shapes,” said Andy Reagan, a Ph.D. candidate in mathematics at the University of Vermont and the lead author of the paper. “Rather: the math and machine learning have identified them.”They did this by training the machine to take all the words of the book, section by section, and measure the average happiness of a given bag of words based on how an individual word scored. The researchers assigned individual happiness scores to more than 10,000 frequently-used words by crowdsourcing the effort on the website Mechanical Turk. This portion of the research is fascinating in and of itself: The 10 words that people ranked as happiest were laughter, happiness, love, happy, laughed, laugh, laughing, excellent, laughs, and joy. The 10 words that people ranked as least happy were terrorist, suicide, rape, terrorism, murder, death, cancer, killed, kill, and die.

hey collected computer-generated story arcs for nearly 2,000 works of fiction, classifying each into one of six core types of narratives (based on what happens to the protagonist):1. Rags to Riches (rise)2. Riches to Rags (fall)3. Man in a Hole (fall then rise)4. Icarus (rise then fall)5. Cinderella (rise then fall then rise)           6. Oedipus (fall then rise then fall)

Vonnegut had mapped stories by hand, but in 2016, with sophisticated computing power, natural language processing, and reams of digitized text, it’s possible to map the narrative patterns in a huge corpus of literature. It’s also possible to ask a computer to identify the shapes of stories for you.

Vonnegut, in his ever charming way, was quite pleased with himself for making this connection. And 35 years later, his idea had resonated enough with a group of mathematicians and computer scientists

Those steps at the beginning look like the creation myth of virtually every society on earth. And then I saw that the stroke of midnight looked exactly like the unique creation myth in the Old Testament.”

Vonnegut mapping the narrative arc of popular storylines along a simple graph. The X-axis represents the chronology of the story, from beginning to end, while the Y-axis represents the experience of the protagonist, on a spectrum of ill fortune to good fortune.

(“It was rejected because it was so simple and looked like too much fun,” Vonnegut explained.) But he continued to carry the idea with him for many years after that, and spoke publicly about it more than once. It was, essentially, this: “There is no reason why the simple shapes of stories can’t be fed into computers. They are beautiful shapes.”

Researchers from University College London report that readers skim information, rarely reread, and engage in something called ‘power browsing’ rather than actual reading. ‘The picture that emerges,’ the study reports, ‘is that most visitors to scholarly sites view only a few pages, many of which do not even contain real content, and in any case do not stop long enough to do any real reading.’ This could signal the emergence of ‘a whole new form of online reading behaviour… one based on skimming titles, contents pages and abstracts’. The development psychologist Maryanne Wolf at Tufts University in Massachusetts argues that: ‘We are not only what we read. We are how we read,’ and that our online habits might cause us to lose the ability to read closely, carefully and critically.

A recent study from the University of Florida shows that what we read affects how we write, particularly when it comes to syntactic complexity. That explains why many college professors continue to note a decrease in students’ writing skills. Apparently, online content, which tends toward simplistic syntax, has a greater impact on student writing than do writing courses aimed at students.

No matter what the technology might be doing to the brain, it’s become increasingly clear to me as a teacher that learning is impaired. I believe that texting is largely to blame for my students not knowing how to use possessive apostrophes, or even how they’re intended to be used. I get papers on the ‘planet Mar’s’, research about what happens at ‘doctors offices’, arguments about ‘robot’s effects’ on the economy. Today’s university students, accustomed to wordprocessing software with autocorrect, don’t actually know the rules of grammar, and don’t think that they’re important – at least, not until they lose points on a paper.

Employers expect responses to email at night and on weekends – as do students – and most of us feel pressured to oblige. This expectation causes a feedback loop. And as people become accustomed to getting immediate answers, they do less digging for information themselves. I can’t count how often my students email me to ask when my office hours are. I write back the same way every time: ‘Check the first page of the syllabus.’ They email me without checking to see if the syllabus has the answer because they can, because I’m supposed to be accessible and answer their questions. This is one of the main reasons I won’t get a smartphone. I would check my work email in bar bathrooms and feel compelled to answer such emails, thereby training students that such behaviour isn’t just acceptable, but fruitful. Back when I was in college, my only outside-of-class access to my professors was in office hours. Would I have trudged to my professor’s office to enquire when she held office hours?

While it might sound easy enough to simply turn off a phone or leave it at home when heading to the library or to class, most people aren’t comfortable with that. After all, 75 per cent of Americans take their phones into the bathroom. People between the ages of 18-24 check their phones an average of 74 times a day.

Increasingly, students express dismay at their ability to manage time and to stay focused. Though I’m grateful on a daily basis that Facebook and cellphones weren’t around when I was in college, this isn’t a new problem. Students have always found more satisfying ways to spend time than writing essays and studying for tests; even with nothing urgently (or not so urgently) fun to do, they have always waited until the last minute. But now students who aren’t necessarily procrastinators, or who used to be able to focus on assignments, find it harder and harder to fight distraction.

A California State University study monitored middle-, high-school and college students who had been instructed to research something important for 15 minutes. Two minutes in, students’ focus started to wane as they checked messages, texts and various websites. The average student lasted six minutes before caving to the temptation to engage in social media. Despite being watched, students spent only approximately 65 per cent of the allotted time studying. Given that most students spend far longer than 15 minutes trying to do coursework, it’s easy to see how little gets done, and how checking messages or opening up another browser tab would be increasingly difficult to resist, especially if we tell ourselves it’s related to work or study.

Ohio State University found that walking while texting has caused a significant rise in injuries. In Chongqing in China, sidewalks contain a special lane for people who can’t be bothered to look up from their phones. And in the German city of Augsburg, there are traffic signals on the ground for people who would otherwise endanger themselves by failing to notice red lights.

Even students who take notes on their laptops miss out. A study from Princeton University shows that we process information better when taking notes by hand because writing is slower than typing (an argument often spun in favour of laptops), which helps students learn and retain the material. Similarly, people better comprehend what they’re reading if it’s on paper rather than on the screen. In a study from the University of Stavanger in Norway, readers on Kindle struggled to remember plot details in comparison with those who read printed books, perhaps because the physical act of turning the pages helps our memories encode the words. Another study revealed comprehension loss for subjects reading PDF versions of texts. Such findings have caused professors to ban computers in the classroom, which is something I used to do but can’t any more.

A University of Waterloo professor who put a postgraduate at the back of his lecture hall to observe his students learned that 85 per cent of them did something unrelated to class on their laptops; a Cornell University study confirms that most students engage in ‘high-tech “doodling”’ and communication during class. One might think that the whopping $65,000 cost of attending Boston University for a year would provide ample reason to maintain focus during class, but one would be wrong.

When I end class, they whip out their phones with a collective sigh of relief, as though they’ve all just been allowed to go to the bathroom after having to hold it all day.

A University of Nebraska-Lincoln study indicates that 80 per cent of college students send text messages during class. Nearly 100 per cent of them text before and after class. In the minutes before class

have a rule about cellphones in class: if one disrupts us by ringing, vibrating or sounding an alarm, the owner has to sing a song or bust some dance moves in front of the class.

I have a rule about cellphones in class: if one disrupts us by ringing, vibrating or sounding an alarm, the owner has to sing a song or bust some dance moves in front of the class. At first, this provision in the syllabus elicits snickers, but it’s no laughing matter. You need to be able to turn off your phones and pay attention, I say. On the first day of class, they shut off their phones. But it doesn’t stay that way.

(function(){TWP=window.TWP||{};TWP.Features=TWP.Features||{};TWP.Features.Ad=TWP.Features.Ad||{};TWP.Features.Ad.Leaderboard={};TWP.Features.Ad.Leaderboard.viewability=false;TWP.Features.Ad.Leaderboard.sticky=true;TWP.Features.Ad.Leaderboard.belowSharebar=false})(); Local Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say Add to list On my list Claire Handscombe is an avid reader and reads using a variety of digital and print products. Because of her online reading habits, Handscombe says she sometimes scans novels while she's reading, looking for keywords and missing what's being written. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post) By Michael S. Rosenwald Michael S. Rosenwald Enterprise reporter focusing on history, the social sciences, and culture. Email Bio Follow April 6, 2014 Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. 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. “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. But it’s not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel. “It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.” To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. window.pbDeferredSSISingle=window.pbDeferredSSISingle||new Array; 1 of 10 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × EmbedCopyShare Caption If there are stages of grief and steps to recovery, isn’t the act of reading a complicated, evolving thing over time? Cartoonist Lynda Barry, one of scores of writers at the National Book Festival on Sept. 21-22, certainly thinks so. (Related: 12 authors, 12 reasons why they write) Linda Barry/On Beyond Literature Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. .wp-volt-gal-preroll-video{width:100%;height:100%} (function(){var __e=window.__e||[],ssiSingleFooter={initComplete:false,init:function(){pbDeferredSSISingle.push("https://d2p9l91d5g68ru.cloudfront.net/PrerollPlugin/PrerollPlugin.min.js");pbDeferredSSISingle.push("//www.washingtonpost.com/pb/gr/p/ssiSingle/rW51kl1W7jUvVr/hi-pri-render.js?_\x3d69d5d");pbDeferredSSISingle.push("//www.washingtonpost.com/pb/gr/p/ssiSingle/rW51kl1W7jUvVr/render.js?_\x3d69d5d");pbDeferredSSISingle.push("//www.washingtonpost.com/pb/gr/p/ssiSingle/rW51kl1W7jUvVr/instance.js?_\x3d69d5d"); wp_import(pbDeferredSSISingle).always(function(){initComplete=true})}};if(typeof wp_pb.StaticMethods=="undefined"||typeof wp_pb.StaticMethods.isPageHydrated=="undefined"||wp_pb.StaticMethods.isPageHydrated())if(!ssiSingleFooter.initComplete&&(document.readyState=="interactive"||document.readyState=="complete"))ssiSingleFooter.init();else document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){ssiSingleFooter.init()});__e.push(["shamble",function(){ssiSingleFooter.init()}])})(); “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.” 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. Time spent online — on desktop and mobile devices — was expected to top five hours per day in 2013 for U.S. adults, according to eMarketer, which tracks digital behavior. That’s up from three hours in 2010. Word lovers and scientists have called for a “slow reading” movement, taking a branding cue from the “slow food” movement. 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.” 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. There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills.AdChoicesADVERTISING The brain is the innocent bystander in this new world. It just reflects how we live. “The brain is plastic its whole life span,” Wolf said. “The brain is constantly adapting.” 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. After a day of scrolling through the Web and hundreds of e-mails, she sat down one evening to read Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game.” “I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.” Adapting to read The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read. Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways — one page led to the next page, and so on. Sure, there might be pictures mixed in with the text, but there didn’t tend to be many distractions. Reading in print even gave us a remarkable ability to remember where key information was in a book simply by the layout, researchers said. We’d know a protagonist died on the page with the two long paragraphs after the page with all that dialogue. The Internet is different. With so much information, hyperlinked text, videos alongside words and interactivity everywhere, our brains form shortcuts to deal with it all — scanning, searching for key words, scrolling up and down quickly. This is nonlinear reading, and it has been documented in academic studies. Some researchers believe that for many people, this style of reading is beginning to invade when dealing with other mediums as well. “We’re spending so much time touching, pushing, linking, scroll­ing and jumping through text that when we sit down with a novel, your daily habits of jumping, clicking, linking is just ingrained in you,” said Andrew Dillon, a University of Texas professor who studies reading. “We’re in this new era of information behavior, and we’re beginning to see the consequences of that.” Brandon Ambrose, a 31-year-old Navy financial analyst who lives in Alexandria, knows of those consequences. His book club recently read “The Interestings,” a best-seller by Meg Wolitzer. When the club met, he realized he had missed a number of the book’s key plot points. It hit him that he had been scanning for information about one particular aspect of the book, just as he might scan for one particular fact on his computer screen, where he spends much of his day. “When you try to read a novel,” he said, “it’s almost like we’re not built to read them anymore, as bad as that sounds.” Ramesh Kurup noticed something even more troubling. Working his way recently through a number of classic authors — George Eliot, Marcel Proust, that crowd — Kurup, 47, discovered that he was having trouble reading long sentences with multiple, winding clauses full of background information. Online sentences tend to be shorter, and the ones containing complicated information tend to link to helpful background material. “In a book, there are no graphics or links to keep you on track,” Kurup said. It’s easier to follow links, he thinks, than to keep track of so many clauses in page after page of long paragraphs. Kurup’s observation might sound far-fetched, but told about it, Wolf did not scoff. She offered more evidence: Several English department chairs from around the country have e-mailed her to say their students are having trouble reading the classics. “They cannot read ‘Middlemarch.’ They cannot read William James or Henry James,” Wolf said. “I can’t tell you how many people have written to me about this phenomenon. The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James.” Wolf points out that she’s no Luddite. She sends e-mails from her iPhone as often as one of her students. She’s involved with programs to send tablets to developing countries to help children learn to read. But just look, she said, at Twitter and its brisk 140-character declarative sentences. “How much syntax is lost, and what is syntax but the reflection of our convoluted thoughts?” she said. “My worry is we will lose the ability to express or read this convoluted prose. Will we become Twitter brains?” Bi-literate brains? Wolf’s next book will look at what the digital world is doing to the brain, including looking at brain-scan data as people read both online and in print. She is particularly interested in comprehension results in screen vs. print reading. Already, there is some intriguing research that looks at that question. A 2012 Israeli study of engineering students — who grew up in the world of screens — looked at their comprehension while reading the same text on screen and in print when under time pressure to complete the task. The students believed they did better on screen. They were wrong. Their comprehension and learning was better on paper. Researchers say that the differences between text and screen reading should be studied more thoroughly and that the differences should be dealt with in education, particularly with school-aged children. There are advantages to both ways of reading. There is potential for a bi-literate brain.

Twitter and its brisk 140-character declarative sentences.

“I can’t tell you how many people have written to me about this phenomenon. The students no longer will or are perhaps incapable of dealing with the convoluted syntax and construction of George Eliot and Henry James.”

Reading in print even gave us a remarkable ability to remember where key information was in a book simply by the layout, researchers said. We’d know a protagonist died on the page with the two long paragraphs after the page with all that dialogue.

“I’m not kidding: I couldn’t do it,” she said. “It was torture getting through the first page. I couldn’t force myself to slow down so that I wasn’t skimming, picking out key words, organizing my eye movements to generate the most information at the highest speed. I was so disgusted with myself.”

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. There is concern that young children’s affinity and often mastery of their parents’ devices could stunt the development of deep reading skills.

Word lovers and scientists have called for a “slow reading” movement, taking a branding cue from the “slow food” movement. 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.”

(function(){TWP=window.TWP||{};TWP.Features=TWP.Features||{};TWP.Features.Ad=TWP.Features.Ad||{};TWP.Features.Ad.Leaderboard={};TWP.Features.Ad.Leaderboard.viewability=false;TWP.Features.Ad.Leaderboard.sticky=true;TWP.Features.Ad.Leaderboard.belowSharebar=false})(); Local Serious reading takes a hit from online scanning and skimming, researchers say Add to list On my list Claire Handscombe is an avid reader and reads using a variety of digital and print products. Because of her online reading habits, Handscombe says she sometimes scans novels while she's reading, looking for keywords and missing what's being written. (Bonnie Jo Mount/The Washington Post) By Michael S. Rosenwald Michael S. Rosenwald Enterprise reporter focusing on history, the social sciences, and culture. Email Bio Follow April 6, 2014 Claire Handscombe has a commitment problem online. 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. “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. But it’s not just online anymore. She finds herself behaving the same way with a novel. “It’s like your eyes are passing over the words but you’re not taking in what they say,” she confessed. “When I realize what’s happening, I have to go back and read again and again.” To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia. window.pbDeferredSSISingle=window.pbDeferredSSISingle||new Array; 1 of 10 Full Screen Autoplay Close Skip Ad × EmbedCopyShare Caption If there are stages of grief and steps to recovery, isn’t the act of reading a complicated, evolving thing over time? Cartoonist Lynda Barry, one of scores of writers at the National Book Festival on Sept. 21-22, certainly thinks so. (Related: 12 authors, 12 reasons why they write) Linda Barry/On Beyond Literature Buy Photo Wait 1 second to continue. .wp-volt-gal-preroll-video{width:100%;height:100%} (function(){var __e=window.__e||[],ssiSingleFooter={initComplete:false,init:function(){pbDeferredSSISingle.push("https://d2p9l91d5g68ru.cloudfront.net/PrerollPlugin/PrerollPlugin.min.js");pbDeferredSSISingle.push("//www.washingtonpost.com/pb/gr/p/ssiSingle/rW51kl1W7jUvVr/hi-pri-render.js?_\x3d69d5d");pbDeferredSSISingle.push("//www.washingtonpost.com/pb/gr/p/ssiSingle/rW51kl1W7jUvVr/render.js?_\x3d69d5d");pbDeferredSSISingle.push("//www.washingtonpost.com/pb/gr/p/ssiSingle/rW51kl1W7jUvVr/instance.js?_\x3d69d5d"); wp_import(pbDeferredSSISingle).always(function(){initComplete=true})}};if(typeof wp_pb.StaticMethods=="undefined"||typeof wp_pb.StaticMethods.isPageHydrated=="undefined"||wp_pb.StaticMethods.isPageHydrated())if(!ssiSingleFooter.initComplete&&(document.readyState=="interactive"||document.readyState=="complete"))ssiSingleFooter.init();else document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded",function(){ssiSingleFooter.init()});__e.push(["shamble",function(){ssiSingleFooter.init()}])})(); “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.” 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. Time spent online — on desktop and mobile devices — was expected to top five hours per day in 2013 for U.S. adults, according to eMarketer, which tracks digital behavior. That’s up from three hours in 2010.

“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.”

To cognitive neuroscientists, Handscombe’s experience is the subject of great fascination and growing alarm. Humans, they warn, seem to be developing digital brains with new circuits for skimming through the torrent of information online. This alternative way of reading is competing with traditional deep reading circuitry developed over several millennia.