More and more is read … on screen. We spend our days hunched over our tablets and smartphones, and even the most established newspapers migrate from paper to the mobile web. The abandonment of analog reading for digital has effects on the way our brain works, according to an experiment by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University and Darmouth College in Pittsburgh.
These researchers have found that screen readers tend to linger on small details and meanings are lost. They retain the anecdotal and concrete, but the ideas that inform the content escape them. In other words, their capacity for abstraction is reduced.
If right, this work would agree with those who defend that the flood of data typical of the internet is making us more superficial, incapable of deep thought and alien to concentration and contemplation.
Digital vs. analogical
Study participants had to perform several tasks: fill out a form, read a short story, and compare car models. To do this, they were divided into two groups; one that completed the tests on paper and another that did it on a screen.
Those who used computers captured isolated data, while the “analog” ones obtained much better results in the interpretation of the content. In the short story comprehension test, those who had read it in print understood the meaning of the narrative much better and those who had read it in digital format remembered the details more.
In the car comparison, 66% of those who had read it on paper were right when they said which was the best model, compared to 43% of those who had seen it on a screen.
The authors of the study believe that “the increasing demands of multitasking, divided attention and the overabundance of information associated with the use of digital technologies could make people prefer less demanding tasks than abstract thinking.” Burdened by the avalanche of online data and the jump from one activity to another, we would choose to take refuge in easy cognitive tasks.
Scientists do not dare to say if this change will be negative or positive in the long term, but they do not doubt one thing: digital is changing the way we process and understand the world, especially in generations born already in the internet age .
