Real Reading, Fake Reading
What is neuroscience, anyway?
The words just flow into your brain. Was it me, or did ecstasy seem to buzz through that sentence? The CEO of Spritz, Inc., Frank Waldman, was describing the company’s new reading app, Spritz. What a promise! Reading without so much as trivial ocular effort. The ultimate in sedentary pleasures. Reading exertion zero. No eye movement, no tracking of lines, no keeping of one’s place on a page.
(Try reading a self-help book with Spritz here, or check out the official demo here.)
A speed-reading application that strategically flashes a word at a time to help you pick up your reading pace, Spritz sounded hot to me—especially that greedy and passive language influx. “Flow” turned out to be an evocative image for others, too. Reviewers couldn’t wait to try the service, which made exorbitant claims to “reimagining reading” and had been three years in the making in Boston, the nation’s undefeated capital of learning and literacy. But they were chiefly eager to debunk Spritz as an unctuous fraud. Spritz, wrote Ian Bogost in The Atlantic, is “the latest repackaging of a decades-old optical snake oil.”
That wasn’t all. In another insta-debunk that appeared before the app’s official launch, The New Yorker quoted Keith Rayner, a psychology professor with an eye-tracking lab at U.C. San Diego, on the science of Spritz. “Hogwash” was his finding. Snake oil and hogwash: a neat trick. Calling bullshit on new tech in blustery terms never fails to make tech-blog headlines.
The Spritz pre-launch build up and takedown marked a cartoonishly significant data point in the digital revolution. Unexploited as of this writing, with an entirely reasonable ambition, Spritz offers a new way to read quickly. There’s nothing indecent in this offering. But the dialogue around Spritz was hardly like one that might attend a material-world invention: a new way to store bath toys or trap mice. Instead, the reaction to Spritz was near-hysterical. Like iTunes, YouTube and Instagram, Spritz was a digital artifact that tapped into both the revolution’s otherworldly promises, and its profound sensory-emotional losses.
Sure enough, the Spritz inventors spoke of their product as if it were revealed religion. Spritz, the materials claim, “reimagines” and “reinvents” reading—no less than the defining act of history, the humanities and, some say, humanness itself.
The mourners’ protests and sobs were just as exaggerated: Spritz is snake oil and hogwash and a dire threat to all that is sacred about symbols and sentience.
Bogost’s enormously evocative review proposes that Spritz might offer not a way to read but “an attentional version of data compression,” required because the Internet is too vast and fast to be legible. Rather than “reading,” we’re encountering data and tallying those encounters as cultural capital. “The faster we can be force fed material”—as Bogost cynically puts it—“the larger volume of such matter we can attach to our user profiles and accounts as data to be stored, sold, and bartered.”
Spritz is for not real readers, then. And here’s where our most sacred class values came in, pounded with a hammer. It’s no surprise that The Atlantic and The New Yorker serve as the old guardians, policing the borders of literacy. Spritz works, they concede, for stuff you have to read—discovery, briefs, memos and social-media “updates” for data merchants and info tradesmen—not for the pleasure reading of books that defines the true man of letters. Juxtaposing a moral line on a class line, Spritz, several reviewers argued, was not for virtuous people who liked to read. It was for subliterate business types who have to read.
Separating real from false reading, and real from false readers, has been a power proposition with sinister consequences since the 1st century A.D., when sofers argued that reading the then-new codices (books with separate pages) wasn’t really reading. Until you’ve found your way in a maddeningly disorienting Torah scroll, went the argument that safeguarded the scribes’ status as the one literate caste, you haven’t really read at all. (I thank the novelist Dara Horn for this point.)
But then on Twitter, DeSales Harrison, a poet and professor of English at Oberlin, and a dear friend, opened my eyes to a credible loss Spritz might represent. He tweeted his review: “Speed reading apps deny the existence of white space, line breaks, the idea of the page.” He framed the pain this way: “#deathofpoetry.”
What I understood suddenly was that Spritz was the latest way for technologists to flog the magic of being digital and the latest way for analog minds to register one of the most painful insults to our cognitive organization. Like schools that abolish recess, the Internet often seems to deny its citizens R&R—spaces (white space, line breaks) for response, intake and contemplation. For recess. It’s no wonder that a discourse around “mindfulness” and meditation has grown up in response to a digital world of wall-to-wall stimulus. The old drinking-from-a-firehose charge acquired new momentum with Spritz. No time to swallow! We don’t want words to course without cease into the brain, the poets said. We need to sit still in the wordlessness, our brains unmolested even by seemingly effortless inward flow. We want to actually drink, to taste the liquid on our tongues. Not just to be hydrated by the machine. And we want, at regular intervals, to feel that thirst is being quenched, is quenched.
That poetry on the page, with its crucial spatial organization, seemed under fire by Spritz made sense as a pretext for grief and longing. Poetry, spoken or written, is always dying, supplanted by prose, an early form of “false” literacy; poets exist in part to eulogize verse itself.
But most of the attacks on Spritz came dressed in scientific jargon. That didn’t make them any less off-kilter. In spite of Spritz’s research showing that readers using it retained as much or more of what they read using traditional technologies (pages, books, scrollable screens), for example, John M. Henderson, director of something called the Institute for Mind and Brain at the University of South Carolina, cited other research on similar (but not identical) tech from the 1970s. With an application like Spritz, Henderson inferred from his decades-old data, “there just isn’t enough time to put the meaning together and store it in memory (what psychologists call ‘consolidation’).”
Consolidation. Sometimes it surprises me that pre-neuroscience psychology still insists on its own technical-sounding names for various kinds of thinking. At the same time, these names—like Freudian terminology—rarely seem to designate anything in the visible world. The non-ostensive jargon, rather than illuminating anything, adds another muddy layer of (typically worse) poetry to cognitive processes that come already kitted out in metaphors. Consolidation, which sounds like a word from management consulting, is more elegantly described as learning—or even enlightenment.
With Spritz, as usual, I was happy for the haters. Especially the ones with sciencey language and odd “centers” awash in public-private funds. Having written for an eternity about television—the only pastime covered in The New York Times that’s considered both an art and a public health hazard—I have an entrenched habit of ignoring what the social sciences say about linchpin cultural practices.
For a hundred years American studies have leveraged the word “science”—in hard science, soft science, pseudoscience, social science, neuroscience, Christian Science, Scientology—to prove that culture is bad for us. That’s movies, games, theater, poetry, prose, television, music. Not a year goes by without new, lavishly funded studies, backed by universities or drug companies, that purport to detect pathogens in art and entertainment.
For this bad habit among would-be scientists, I blame Sir Percivall Pott. Pott was an English surgeon who became one of the world’s first orthopedists in 1768, when he published a gripping report on the virtues of splinting his own broken leg instead of amputating it. But that wasn’t Pott’s only breakthrough. No: by connecting cases of scrotal cancer in chimney sweeps to carcinogens in coal tar in 1775, Pott showed that cancer can be caused by agents in the environment. This was a monumentally useful finding, made well before Louis Pasteur’s work tightened the case for germ theory by connecting microorganisms and puerperal fever. Pott’s findings put in place progressive labor laws governing the work of chimney sweeps, who were grievously underaged and brutally mistreated; and it also changed irrevocably the way we think about disease.
So how is Pott, a medical laureate of the first rank, to blame for the bad but tantalizing science that, year in and year out, makes cultural objects unlikely incubators of brain-tissue-eating disease? Because Potts invented a riveting literary genre: the “study” whose language conjures a causal, chemical relation between invisible objects in the outside world and the corruption of body and mind. As an empirical argument about coal dust and cancer, Pott’s case is irrefutable. As a polemic it is something better still: surpassingly satisfying and effective. Thanks to Pott, practices got banned. Laws got passed. Lives got saved. Who in any field wouldn’t be inspired by the ingenuity of Pott, onetime apprentice in the Worshipful Company of Barbers—the haircutting monks who weren’t allowed to shed blood, and thus partnered with irreligious cutters from the laity, namely surgeons—who helped create orthopedics and then saved lives with the idea of the carcinogen?
Alas, in the rush to try Pott’s genre, and borrow his infectious rhetoric, subsequent arguments in the same style dispensed with Pott’s actual analysis of scrotal sores and the composition of tar. Instead, Pott’s landmark discoveries inspired non-scientists to purport (absent material evidence) to have found toxins whenever they wanted to crusade against anything they found morally objectionable.
Take, say, novels. Novel-reading is today the defining practice of the sound and literate mind. If you don’t read “for pleasure,” after all—reading, that is, “not for work or school,” in the words of the National Endowment for the Arts—you are not said to read at all; to read in the noblest and most salubrious sense in our time is to read novels. But in a rousing and beloved 1797 screed called “Novel Reading, a Cause of Female Depravity,” novels are depicted as more sickening than coal dust in a boy’s scrotum. And indeed they’re sickening by the same dynamic. In impelling women to have premarital and extramarital sex, novels were not said to fill pretty heads with sordid notions (also a rank metaphor), but rather to pollute the bloodstream: “Without this poison instilled, as it were, into the blood, females in ordinary life would never have been so much the slaves of vice.”
The “poison,” in the anonymous ranters telling, was not something that could be pointed to—not a molecule or speck of dust—but rather the voluptuous language and unsparing depiction of romantic passion that, it was argued, suggested to female readers that they ought to surrender their chastity and sleep with their friends’ husbands. By sidelining actual evidence for “poison” while at the same time borrowing Pott’s model of pathology, the ranter let his lively silliness slide (“as it were”) into medical-sounding fact. Thus emerges the sheen of “social science” onto what’s no more than garden-variety sermonizing.
It’s anybody’s guess why pathologizing culture is a cottage industry in the U.S., as nowhere else. A strong possibility is that art and culture are believed to cut into productivity. In a nation preoccupied with cradle-to-grave work and metastatic economic growth, productivity is naturally imagined to be perfect synonym for health. Jeremiads against novel-reading 200 years ago may now seem ludicrous, but the culture-as-pathology genre, these “studies,” bolstered by beetle-browed language that sounds so much like science that it’s called science even though no equations or invocations of natural law corrupt it, is having a heyday. Every year another book with a name like The Shallows or The Dumbest Generation cites these studies and condemns the Internet with no less righteous indignation than our Tory pamphleteer.
Exposure to Michel Foucault and historians of science at a tender age left me with no doubt that the language and apparatus of science are regularly deployed in a power play. This ought to be a truism by now, but still we need constant reminders. In the 20th century, unruly players like gay people were criminalized and called diseased under the sign of science. In this century, writers with degrees in anything from social work to English cite “neuroscience”—no longer the biology of nerves, but rather a vocabulary broadly applied to consciousness and philosophy, and founded on the pleasing if theological-sounding 1950s theory of the “triune” brain—to regulate the magic of human experience. This includes memory, doubt, faith, focus, wonder, shame, sadness, ecstasy, tranquility, revelation. Their claims have a certain nervousness attached to them. Possibly this is since their primary tool (functional magnetic resonance imaging, the fMRI, which impressionistically represents brain activity) is notoriously unreliable. Worse still, for those of us interested in phenomenology, the claims of neuroscience rarely enrich the human experience they set out to elucidate. In fact, they flatten it and make it unrecognizable.
They turn, that is, the rapture of reading and the Internet into confounding sophistry and grandstanding—and then merely assert, over and over, and with mounting hysteria, that it’s a “cause of depravity.”
