Brains

How does declining literacy literally affect our brains?

Well, for one, it allows atrophy between neural wiring that is commonly associated with deep reading and analysis. And it also, like I've mentioned before, negatively impacts our emotional reflective capacity.

1. When we read complex literature, like essays and long-form journalism, it activates a wide network of or brain regions. It affects language, memory, visual, emotional, and associative areas. When people shift towards shallow reading (like scrolling, skimming, and short form content) those neural circuits weaken. Our attention spans weaken (which we can all attest to) and our empathy that develops when we hold ideas and connect them is atrophying and we are losing our deep reading skills. As a result, we have less patience for ambiguity, lower comprehension, and weakened critical thinking. Our reading brain is developed over time. It is built; we are not born with it. Without exercise, the connections fade.

   
   

2. Fiction and narrative reading stimulate the default mode network, the system involved in empathy, imagination, and moral reasoning. As literature declines and people read less narrative or challenging texts, this network is less engaged. Meaning, we practice less perspective taking and emotional reflection. Psychologists have shown that reading literary fiction measurably improves empathy and theory of mind; less reading means less rehearsal of those skills.

Declining literacy weakens both the brain’s cognitive wiring (for focus, inference, and analysis) and its emotional wiring (for empathy and understanding). Reading isn’t just cultural — it’s neurological training for how we think and feel.

Neurons fire and pathways form, wires linking and changing form, ideas run and connections meet, literature is read and brains grow meat. I'm feeling poetic and having fun rhyming. It must be all the literature I'm trying. Novels and essays, psychology and brains, ideas are running and connections are meeting.