"Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World"

  An article in the newspaper, sent to me by my daughter,  caught my attention.  It was about reading in the digital age.  "Skim reading is the new normal".  Has this skimming, altered our brains?  Are readers losing the knack of sustained reading?
   "The reader who skims can lose the ability to grasp another person's feelings or perceive beauty."
  It has been noticed that university students are not signing up for 19th century literature because they cannot persevere through Dickens or Eliot.
   This article was written by Robert Fulford, but he quoted Maryanne Wolf, who is a neuroscientist.

   So I tracked down Maryanne's book "Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World".

   In the past, Maryanne has researched how the brain learns to read.  She believes that humans were never born to read. "The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens...The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire."

   In this book, Maryanne explores how the digital age has affected the reading brain.  The concept is fascinating, but the complexity of the brain, which is the focus of the first two chapters, overwhelmed me and I skimmed to get to the information I was looking for.
  Her question is this:
"Are we as a society, beginning to lose the quality of attention necessary to give time to the essential human faculties that make up and sustain deep reading?  If so, what can we do about it?"
   Having taught young children to read, I was wondering how such learning would need to change in the future.
   Since this is new territory,  there is great debate about the future of reading.  Technology brings benefits.  We cannot ignore it. So we need to work toward "building a bilateral brain".
  As I have said, this book is complex and I feel that I just scratched the surface.  But it makes me more concerned about the fact that our libraries, which have jumped on the technology bandwagon, have lost the focus on literacy.