Apparently
not, in neuropsychologist Daniel Willingham’s informed judgment (“Smartphones Don’t
Make Us Dumb”). He says being glued to screens for most of our waking hours
does not diminish our ability to concentrate – since “mental reorganization at
that scale happens over evolutionary time,” not within the lifespan of any
individual. Instead, we (and our kids) are losing merely the desire to
concentrate as we are lured by endless entertainment opportunities. Prof.
Willingham also points to research showing “that the amount of leisure reading
hasn’t changed with the advent of the digital age” – and, besides, “brainier
hobbies have never been all that popular.” This raises all sorts of interesting
questions – is the absence of statistically significant experimental evidence reliable
evidence of absence? And what about some studies which contradict Willingham’s
statements? Caleb Crain [“Twilight of the Books”], for example, has cited
studies showing that “we are reading less as we age, and we are reading less
than people who were our age ten or twenty years ago”; that between 1992 and
2003 the proportion of [American] adults who qualified as proficient readers
(who could, for example, compare the viewpoints expressed in two editorials)
declined from 15 to 13 percent”; that in the Netherlands in the mid-1990s, college
graduates born after 1969 were reading less than people without a college
degree born before 1950; etc. Let’s hope this time the majority neuroscientific
opinion is on more solid ground than the near-consensus which produced the
assault on dietary fat, for example.
