Episode 401: The Death of Reading: A Neuroscientist’s Warning
In this episode, Dominic sits down with Dr. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA who has spent her career studying what she calls “the reading brain.” Maryanne explains why reading doesn’t come naturally to us the way language or vision does. It’s a skill the brain has to build, circuit by circuit, and one that can atrophy if we stop exercising it.
The numbers are stark. Nearly a third of American adults score at the lowest level of literacy. Fourth grade reading scores are at a two decade low. Eighth graders are performing worse than they have in four decades. And it isn’t just a US problem, countries around the world are seeing similar declines.
Maryanne argues that these statistics are symptoms of something deeper: a shift away from what she calls “deep reading,” the slow process that builds background knowledge, inference, empathy and critical thinking. She shares her own unexpected experience of realising her brain had changed after struggling to reread a novel she once loved, and what she did to rebuild that capacity.
The conversation also digs into AI tools, audiobooks and podcasts, and what neuroscience is starting to reveal about “cognitive surrender,” the growing reliance on technology to do our thinking for us. Maryanne makes the case that this isn’t a minor cultural shift. It’s a battle for how future generations will think, reason and govern themselves.
Episode Transcript:
Dominic Bowen: Every generation worries that the next generation is losing something, and we’re no different. But I can’t help but wonder if this time it’s not just nostalgia. I’m wondering about the actual neural circuitry that lets us sit with a hard idea, that helps us follow an argument through, or empathize with a stranger — and whether some of the things we took for granted a couple of decades ago are now being rewired because of the societies we’re living in.
Today, that’s what we’re discussing: whether declining literacy is just a cultural blip, or a genuine risk to how societies think, decide, and even govern themselves. I’m Dominic Bowen, host of the International Risk Podcast, where we unpack the topics that really matter.
Today we’re joined by Dr. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist who has spent her entire career studying what she calls the reading brain. She’s written two books arguing that deep reading is not just a pastime, but a skill our brains had to build for — and one we might be losing right now. I think this is a really important and extremely interesting conversation, so please do listen to learn more.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf, welcome to the International Risk Podcast.
Maryanne Wolf: What a joy.
Dominic Bowen: Whereabouts in the world do we find you today, Maryanne?
Maryanne Wolf: I’m at UCLA, so I’m in Southern California, in Los Angeles, in a beautiful canyon surrounded by various forms of cacti.
Dominic Bowen: Fantastic — it sounds beautiful. I’d love to unpack some of the data. When we were doing the pre-production research for this episode, the team put together a lot of background material, and some of it is just amazing. One stat that really stood out: the latest US adult skills assessment found that 28% of Americans — a little less than a third — aged between 16 and 65, scored at the lowest level of literacy. Among US twelfth graders finishing high school, only 35% reached NAEP proficiency in reading in 2024, and 32% — again, about a third — failed to reach even the basic level.
That really stands out as more than just “people are reading less.” Your work points to a much more consequential question about what happens to businesses and societies when people lose that ability and that skill to read. How do we even get to a point where a country that’s fantastic and amazing, and leading the world in so many regards, is also leading the world in low levels of literacy?
Maryanne Wolf: Dominic, this has been an issue that has plagued everyone in the reading fields — neuroscience, linguistics, education — because the statistics you’re citing are, if anything, even worse and more insidious when you look at fourth graders and eighth graders. Fourth graders have the lowest scores they’ve had in two decades. Eighth graders — future citizens by any measure — are at their worst in four decades.
So we have the elementary grades, we have the entry point into high school, we have the statistics you cited, and just last week we got the PISA scores, in which the United States is plummeting in literacy and math, falling below countries like Singapore, parts of China, Korea, and Japan. Students in these other parts of the world are doing so much better than we are.
But overall, students around the world are declining in literacy. So it’s not simply a national phenomenon, and it’s not simply an age phenomenon — it’s international.
Now, I’ve been looking at the implications of different mediums on how we read. The statistics about how much or how little people are reading are actually less of a problem than how we are reading. I know you’ve read Reader, Come Home, but the reality is that the reading brain is telling us it’s changing — and these statistics are simply a behavioral symptom of the fact that the brain itself is changing. Reading is not just reading. That’s the important part of talking about deep reading, which I’m sure you’ll ask me about.
Dominic Bowen: Let’s break that down.
Maryanne Wolf: Deep reading is deep thinking. That’s where I’m sure our conversation will take us.
Dominic Bowen: I think that’s fantastic. Years ago I had a debate with a very intelligent, very skilled friend and colleague of mine. He never went to university, but he’s brilliant and has had a fantastic career, and we’ve had many debates over the years about the value of university. I’ve got two master’s degrees and I love university — the day I retire, I’m going to enroll in another degree. I love being pulled and stretched, the same way I love a good workout and getting my sweat up in the gym every morning. I love the same thing with a good book and learning new skills.
What I’ve said to him is: forget the university degree — it’s the fact that it forces you to dive into a topic enough to produce a five- or ten-thousand-word essay. It means you have to read five or ten books, pull apart the key arguments, and understand them. That’s a process you just can’t do if you’re only reading the newspaper or listening to the news every day.
Tell us more about the differences between the mediums and how we’re reading them. I fear we’re going to fall into the trap of just criticizing social media, but tell us, Maryanne — what does that mean?
Maryanne Wolf: It’s far bigger than social media, if you can imagine me saying such a thing. The reality is that the medium of the screen uses a different circuitry when we read. Let me back up just a bit.
Active reading is an incredible use of a circuit that readers had to create from what we learn in school. Reading doesn’t exist natively in the brain — language exists in the brain, vision exists in the brain — but reading is an invention. It uses the brain’s design principles to build new circuits for a new function.
That circuitry starts out very basic — putting vision, language, and basic cognition together. But over time — and you used the word “workout” — the work that learning and studying does creates ever-new connections to our most sophisticated cognitive and linguistic processes, which I call deep reading.
Let me dive a little deeper so your listeners understand. Deep reading is the sum of background knowledge, inference, analogical thinking, reasoning, and empathy — how we enter, especially in fiction, into the thoughts and feelings of others. That’s a very real aspect of brain function. And, importantly, how all of that feeds into critical thinking.
That’s still not the end of it. At the point where the brain brings all those processes together, it gives itself a millisecond pause to reflect and bring our own best thoughts to bear. When I say deep reading is deep thinking, I mean it’s helping our thinking processes become ever more able to understand our world.
You can use a circuit in a very abbreviated, short-circuited way, or you can engage all of those processes — if you give it time. Here’s the difference in mediums: the screen has a propensity to make us short-circuit that process. We want to get done, so we skim — not just the words, but the brain’s more sophisticated processes. We skim our own best thoughts. And we don’t do the workout.
When we talk about exercising the body, reading and writing exercise that circuitry. When we don’t do it — when we’re skimming on-screen — we become less and less likely to go beyond the basic use of the circuit. So those statistics are really a symptom of what we’re not doing. The print medium has a propensity to make us go deeper — to give more time, attention, and effort. That’s the big triptych of the brain: time, attention, and effort — asking questions like: What is the motivation of the author? What can we infer? What does this make us feel or think?
When we neglect those questions, our ability to think critically declines. We’re no longer as capable of discerning what’s true, what’s misinformation, and what’s intentional disinformation. The connections between deep reading and democracy — and demagoguery — are right in front of us, and I don’t think people realize that all these statistics are symptoms of an underused and undermaintained reading-brain circuitry.
Dominic Bowen: Help us understand the practicalities of that. Right now I’m reading a book called Watership Down — I’m about halfway through. It’s a 1970s book, and to anyone who sees it on a bookshelf, it looks like a kids’ book and sounds like a kids’ book. My son asked me what I was reading, and I said, “Honestly, mate, it’s written like a kid’s book — look at the cover.” He said, “It looks like a kid’s book, Dad.” And I said, “Totally — but there are hidden messages.”
I think the author, Richard Adams, said for decades there was no hidden meaning, but there very clearly is one. The first part of the story is almost like an odyssey — an adventure. They go through another rabbit warren that looks like a welfare state, with strong bureaucracy, and I suspect they’ll find other forms of government in other warrens soon.
Why does me reading a book that sounds like a kids’ book, but has more to it, do something to my brain? Why does that make me a better member of society, a better employee?
Maryanne Wolf: What it does is exercise — you used the word “workout” — it exercises the processes needed for everything. That’s really the point about deep reading. If you neglect it, you’ve neglected the opportunity to expand the ways you think about our world. It’s hardly only about literacy statistics, or the fact that so few people are reading more than one book a year. Those are lost opportunities in terms of the brain’s ability to take what it does in reading and turn it into a self-perpetuating cycle. What you read increases your ability to read the next thing, and the next.
But if you don’t, the maxim from neuroscience — “use it or lose it” — is what really happens with the brain. Reading is one of these amazing opportunities. Just as you’re thinking, Dominic, about the possible meanings in Watership Down, regardless of what the author intended, those meanings are being activated because you’re bringing your own analysis to what you’re reading. It doesn’t matter what the author intended — though I hope it matters to some degree — what matters is the activation of your own best thoughts. That’s the Proustian idea from my first book, Proust and the Squid: he called it “the fecund miracle of communication.” It’s fertile. Reading gives us a chance to build our own thinking evermore with everything we read. And the converse is true — when we lose those opportunities, we become victims of our own atrophy.
Dominic Bowen: I’m starting to wonder, as I hear you speak. Someone I love dearly from Ukraine gave me Robert Galbraith’s Cormoran Strike books — I’m not sure if you’re familiar with them; that’s J.K. Rowling writing under one of her pseudonyms. The first book was The Cuckoo’s Calling, and I read it before I’d even left Ukraine. Then I read The Silkworm as soon as I landed in Poland — I ran to a bookshop and got the second book. By the time I got back to Northern Europe I was on the third book, Career of Evil.
They were so interesting, and the characters were so well drawn. But by the end of the third book, I had the suspicion that there was more to what she was writing — that there was something between the lines I was missing. So I did what most of us do nowadays: I opened ChatGPT and said, “I want you to assume you’re an Oxford English professor facilitating a book club. Ask me some questions, and be critical of my answers.” I had this fake book club with ChatGPT, and there was so much of the book I’d missed — quotes, references to other authors, things between the lines.
It really made me think: I’d read the first three books and loved them, but I’d missed so much because I hadn’t done what you’d do at university, or in a real book club. So, listening to you — is reading a lot enough? Does it need to be reading plus analysis, or reading plus discussion, for it to be valuable?
Maryanne Wolf: That’s a lovely question. There are people right now saying the answer to our reading crisis can lie in talking about books, in book clubs — new book clubs are springing up; I just heard of a new one in California. Is that necessary? Not necessarily. What’s so beautiful about reading and rereading is — was it Heraclitus who said you can’t step in the same river twice? You can’t step into the same book twice either, because we bring to it who we are.
So, whether or not ChatGPT can be useful — and I have no doubt it can, and will be, in some ways — what it should not be is relied upon for your own thinking. It can challenge you. It can lead you to your own rereading. But there’s a real difference between simply accepting others’ thoughts and developing your own.
For me, reading can be so many different things. When I go through my email, I’m skimming, by and large — until something like your questions about this episode come in, and then I stop and think, “I have to really read this carefully.” It’s a small example, but it shows that we can use ChatGPT, we can use short-circuited skimming, and in that same medium we can also activate our more sophisticated processes. An intellectual property lawyer once wrote to me and said, “I read your book. I need you to know that I skim, but I freeze on any page I don’t understand — I freeze it until I understand.” He was telling me he can activate deep reading even on a medium that advantages skimming.
So there’s an element of choice. We can read in many different ways, across many genres. Some reading is purely for entertainment — I’m not suggesting you run a ChatGPT book club analysis for that. But for the reading that matters to you, think about your choices. What’s the purpose? If it’s a contract, print it out. If it’s a review I have to write — I review articles — I print it out and encourage myself to read it not slowly, necessarily, but with more intention. If it’s something I can quickly assess and make a judgment call on, I skim it.
If I’m reading Niall Williams’ This Is Happiness, I’m going to read it in a physical book — never on a screen. I want to read about rain, and all its permutations, and the sound of it, and the way it becomes a metaphor for life in Faha. I want to do that with purpose, with choice.
Dominic Bowen: I think anyone listening will clearly understand the importance you place on reading. You’ve said you found yourself struggling to reread The Glass Bead Game — a novel you loved — and that you felt your own brain had changed. For someone who is constantly reading, writing, talking, and exercising your brain, how did that happen? What did that tell you?
Maryanne Wolf: That was a rude awakening, let me tell you. I thought, “I’m the reading scholar here — I’m the one telling people what to think about reading on screen versus print.” And then I fell into the very chasm I was describing to others: getting only the surface of whatever I was reading. I didn’t expect that reaction in myself, and I was extremely upset.
Like a lot of us, I blamed the other party first — I thought, “Hermann Hesse didn’t deserve a Nobel Prize for literature,” which is ridiculous, but I thought it. Then I thought: surely I should at least consider that this is my issue. So I put myself through what I call a basic deep-reading boot camp — I forced myself to read for 20 minutes a day. I wasn’t going to let myself sit with the discomfort of my first reaction to The Glass Bead Game. And that’s when I realized I had changed enormously without knowing it.
The remedy took time — it took two weeks of concentrating anew on what Hesse was really writing, on what the monks in the book were really doing in their game, before I returned to the pace a book demands — because the pace of a book is how you learn to read that particular book. Many books have a pace that’s quite rapid and don’t need the long, deliberate attention that The Glass Bead Game required of me. But after two weeks, back in what I call my reading sanctuary, I realized I had changed — I was as much a recipient, a victim, of screen-reading shallowness as anybody else. That worried me deeply, Dominic. I’m sure you haven’t had that experience, from what you’ve described, but I had, and I hadn’t even known it.
Knowing that, I built some habits — habits of mind, habits of reading. These are my “morning shelves” — mostly philosophy and theology, some poetry — books that force me to read slowly for 20 minutes. That was my boot camp, and I made it what I call bookending my day: I read at the pace the book demands for it to be truly understood, whether it’s prose or poetry, at the start of the day. And whenever possible, I end the day with 20 minutes of fiction that won’t keep me up at night — not a Joël Dicker mystery, but Niall Williams, or Wendell Berry — his Jayber Crow — or Marilynne Robinson. Books that let you step into the river of your own mind and then step back out. They centre you.
Dominic Bowen: I’m a strategic advisor, and I work with business leaders across Europe. My teams are producing more information and analysis than ever — reports, emails. I’ve got 21,000 unread emails in my inbox; I’m clearly never catching up on that. There are dashboards, intelligence assessments coming through every day that I skim, and now I’m using AI to summarize the summaries that are already being produced for me. I’ve got a recorder that captures a lot of my meetings, and I play them back while I’m driving.
I can feel extremely well informed, and for all my faults, I don’t think being uninformed is one of them. But I wonder if there’s still a risk of becoming less capable of analyzing that information deeply. I think all business leaders are probably in the same boat — dashboards, emails, AI summary tools. Are we at risk of becoming as informed, or more informed, than we were five or six years ago, but actually less capable of analyzing that information deeply?
Maryanne Wolf: That’s exactly right. It’s something I tell all students — last month I spoke to a thousand freshmen at Princeton, in dialogue with their president. I tell them: there are good uses, and there are also consequences — consequences of not continuing to develop the evaluative dimension of your brain, so you can evaluate what you’re getting from something like ChatGPT. So your instinct is a very good one.
What worries me even more is that we’re not only losing the ability to evaluate — we’re losing the ability to make judgment calls within our own disciplines. You may know this: there are two or three studies — one from Microsoft, one from MIT. When you write something yourself, versus farming it out or using a search engine to help you, you don’t remember almost anything you “wrote” with ChatGPT. You’re not consolidating it in memory. The Microsoft study looked at managers using ChatGPT, and found that those who used it less were far more evaluative in their management style. Just last week, MIT’s Media Lab published research analyzing this and asking, “What’s happening?” I’d say that when you farm something out, you short-circuit the brain. What they found is that we’re becoming victims of what they call cognitive surrender — we’re surrendering what I’d call deep-reading, or deep cognitive, processes to ChatGPT, Claude, and the rest.
Dominic Bowen: What does that look like? If we continue down this path of cognitive surrender and keep losing the capacity to read deeply, where are we in five or ten years? What does society look like? What does the workplace look like?
Maryanne Wolf: I’m genuinely hopeful, because there are enough elements in society today pushing back. Just take my own schedule of podcast and interview requests — last week alone it was Germany, Switzerland, and Spain, three different countries, with journalists like you who are well informed and are themselves serious readers, worried about this for their own cultures, especially given how low the PISA scores are in some of those countries.
It’s our responsibility as citizens — and people like Dario Amodei at Anthropic, and a similar report from Demis Hassabis at DeepMind published in July, are asking for a pause. From my own small perch — being asked to talk about this — I find real hope that we’ll get a course correction, that we’ll understand more from research, especially in cognitive neuroscience, about what studies like the MIT one are showing: that we may be losing at least as much as we’re gaining, if the brain can no longer evaluate what it’s being fed.
So it’s incumbent on people like you and me to put our small effort into the dike of what’s happening as we move toward an AI-dominated culture. These kinds of reactions — the pushback — tell me the pause will come, not only from the top, but from the bottom up too. You see people upset about data centres now; I’d say that’s a symptom of something the public suspects but doesn’t yet fully understand. It’s up to people like us to explain why we have to think very carefully about the uses of this technology — environmentally, politically, economically. But in my world, this is a battle for the mind of the future child.
Dominic Bowen: Maryanne, I know we’re close to the end of our conversation, but I’d love to ask — a lot of people listening to this podcast probably also listen to audiobooks, and podcasts more generally are booming. We’ve had over 400 episodes of the International Risk Podcast, and it continues to generate more and more listeners, which is fantastic for the topics we cover. But as millions of people consume information by ear, does listening activate the same deep-reading circuits you’ve studied, or is something different happening in the brain?
Maryanne Wolf: This may be the most frequently asked question I get, after “the reading brain and short-circuiting it.” It’s a wonderful mechanism for gathering information, learning, and experiencing — our lives should be full of opportunities to use that circuitry. However, it isn’t the same. It shares many aspects with written language and the reading brain, but it lacks one of the most powerful contributors to understanding: a spatial component.
If I ask you where something is in a book — even in my own book, Reader, Come Home — you might say, “It’s halfway through, on the bottom left.” Is it really? We’re adding spatial help to memory consolidation without even realizing that’s what a physical book gives us. Even more importantly, that spatial aspect helps us monitor our own comprehension. When you’re reading Anna Karenina and you think, “Wait, what happened before she goes to the tracks?” — you go back. That’s called comprehension monitoring, and we do it constantly, almost imperceptibly, checking as we go.
With audio, you can rewind — but Dominic, we don’t. Audio shares with the screen medium a propensity to just keep going, keep going, keep going. So we lose some of our ability to monitor comprehension at the same level, and we lose the ability to freeze our thinking at a certain point.
That said, I think audio is wonderful. My first son is dyslexic and a fantastic artist; if you ask him whether he’s read his mother’s books, he’ll say, “Well, yes and no — I’ve listened to them.” He listens to everything. My other son does both — print and audio — and that’s another valid use, especially in my work on dyslexia: some people use both formats together to enhance their understanding. There are many different ways we can use these mediums well, but we have to be wise about it — how we use any digital or technological medium. I never call these things “tools,” because they’re not. As the philosopher Walter Ong said, we err when we call them tools, because they are changers of internal consciousness. From a neuroscience standpoint, they change the use of the circuitry itself.
Dominic Bowen: One question we always finish on with our guests, Maryanne — when you look around the world, read the news, speak with colleagues, and take in what’s happening globally, what are the international risks that concern you most?
Maryanne Wolf: Our children. Without question — our children. It’s one thing to talk about deep reading in a brain that’s long used deep-reading processes; “use it or lose it” is still very much a worry for older people. But for the young, who’ve never developed those deep-reading processes in the first place — to the degree that this is being farmed out — we aren’t forming the kinds of minds and brains that created the very technology in question.
Dominic Bowen: Very valid. Maryanne, thank you very much for coming on the podcast and sharing your thoughts. I really enjoyed our conversation.
Maryanne Wolf: Thank you, Dominic. I’m sorry I couldn’t see you, but your voice is wonderful. Keep reading.
Dominic Bowen: Well, that was a great conversation with Dr. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist who has spent her career studying the reading brain. I really appreciated hearing her thoughts on the risks of a fast-declining literacy rate, and what’s really at stake when deep reading gives way to the skimming and screens we’re all used to.
Today’s episode was produced and coordinated by Andrea Crafoord. I’m Dominic Bowen, your host. Thanks very much for listening — we’ll speak again in the next couple of days.