“What we attend to and how we attend make all the difference in how we think.”
BY REBECCA SANDBERG
Contemplating the commodity of attention seems among one of the most urgent tasks of our time. “To be a moral human being,” writes Susan Sontag, “is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention…The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention…”
Cognitive Patience
There is a profound magic that occurs when we realize that the written word is the robust burstiness and perplexity of human nature – that we, a collective species, can use language to stir and change the world. In these moments of communal hunting for shortcuts and outsourcing over "cognitive patience" and "syntactic complexity", we are reminded that reading offers a sense of freedom and resiliency.
Scholar and teacher, Maryanne Wolf (1947 - ) says, “No human was born to read”. Literacy requires “new, plastic brain circuits.” Neuroplasticity of the reading brain is kept plastic by the actual act of reading and reading and reading. Wolf enumerates the principle of “plasticity within limits” – that the brain is able to form new sets of pathways by connecting and sometimes repurposing aspects of its older and more basic structures.
Deepening Attention Changes Minds
Wolf is interested specifically in the transition from a literary-based culture to a digital one - a shift in our epoch that begs some research. She writes:
Connections are made through the written word. Books are the places where we can suspend reality and instead, explore our imagination’s more tolerable, more beautiful promise of possibility.
Reading widely allows the mind to be expanded. As a young woman, Wolf’s conviction of this came while working with children in Hawaii. She observed:
With sudden and complete clarity, I saw what would happen if children could not learn the seemingly simple act of passage into…literacy. They would never fall down a hole and experience the exquisite joys of immersion in the reading life…They would never wrestle through the night with ideas too large to fit within their smaller worlds… Most importantly they would never experience the infinite possibilities within their own thoughts that emerge…from each fresh encounter with worlds outside their own. I realized that children…might never reach their full potential as human beings if they never learned to read.
Wolf explores the critical relationship between how the quality of reading and thought is distinctly influenced by changes in attention and “cognitive patience”.
I have often written that we can all appreciate both Hemingway and George Eliot. Nevertheless, I have begun to question the cognitive loss of not being willing or, perhaps in the future, even able to navigate the demands of the complex concepts in denser prose. I am increasingly worried, therefore, about the relationship between the number of characters with which we choose to read or write and how we think.
Wolf equates the first two years of the reading life of childhood as paramount - echoing the overarching premise of British educator Charlotte Mason - that children intrinsically want to learn. Wolf argues that “everything counts for something when you read to your child” – that there is no end of good when reading.
Skimming the Surface
When we do not have the time or patience to read deeply, we skim. Wolf states that “when we skim, we don’t have time to think or feel.” - we experience a “shallowing” effect. The tenuous "slow time” of Keats’s Ode or Wordsworth’s "vacant, pensive mood” - or more broadly - a commitment to the legacy of language, in general, isn't possible without the deep dive.
If our perception of beauty [of the world] becomes reduced to skimming like a water strider across the thin surface of words, we miss the depths below; we will never be led to beauty to learn and understand what lies beneath.
Attention transforms and redirects our ethics by way of habitual recalibration based on our patterns of attention and reading. As Gustave Flaubert famously said, “We read in order to live.”