It is no news that less and less children and adolescents are interested in books because of the internet. The proliferation of social networks, audiovisual content and games via the web cause the reading of textbooks to occupy an increasingly small place.
For decades, the problems caused by those adults who in their childhood were not used to reading the bare minimum have been known, including deficiencies in grammar and also in reading, but mainly poor thinking, and with it a problem-solving ability (of life, not only theoretical) also poor.
Let us remember that reading, in addition to being a pleasure (for several), is an extremely beneficial act for our brain, since it increases the ability to concentrate, promotes empathy and represents a useful exercise to avoid the future loss of cognitive functions.
Human Brain, Learning and Social Networks
Reading produces modifications in brain anatomy, favoring nerve connections, since it notably increases neuronal activity, especially in the left hemisphere. When we read an isolated word, many areas of the brain are stimulated and when we try to understand a text, our brain completes the data of the same with its own experience and imagination. When reading, we are able to recreate situations, scenes, faces or emotional states with all fidelity, and in doing so we stimulate areas of the brain similar to those that would be activated if we carried out those same actions in our real life.
In social networks, children also read, of course, but the complexity of the messages is much less than that of a textbook, which somehow determines simpler, poorer and more basic neural connections.
Human Brain Functions and Learning
Cognitive Neurosciences teach us that reading is a learned human capacity, which requires a joint work of the sense of sight and the brain to capture the images of the letters, their grouping into syllables and their subsequent processing of the meaning of the words. Since the relatively recent appearance of writing, 5,400 years ago, our brain and our visual system have required an adaptation for the recognition of the characters that compose it. Thanks to this joint work between sight and brain, we are able to decipher writing and understand its meaning.
In learning to read, the region of the left occipital-temporal lobe, located at the back of the head, behind the left ear, plays a fundamental role. Until a few years ago, it was known that this region had implications during reading, since it was activated when carrying out this activity, but now we know that it is not only involved, but is essential for it, since its removal causes failures in both the reading as in your understanding. Studies carried out in this regard show that all people, regardless of language or degree of reading learning, show activation in this area while reading, even in the case of texts in Arabic or Hebrew, which are read from right to left.
Brain Activity Reading and Watching Television
In this way, what surprises neuroscientists is how a cultural element such as reading, very recent in terms of evolution and unnecessary for the survival of the species, has ended up having its own space in the brain.
The problem is that the ability to read is not innate, but learned, and this ability must be improved with training, and social networks do not help at all. In fact, researchers fear that the habits created by the new forms of communication will cause an alteration of the ability to concentrate in reading, due to the little vocabulary that is handled and the abbreviations used, and that this will lead to negative involvement of our reading ability and thus reduce the benefits that reading causes in us, such as increased vocabulary, improved spelling, improvement in the way of speaking, social skills, synthesis capacity or empathy.
In the same way, the increase in the hours that the average population spends watching television is detrimental to the more complex mental process that reading requires, since in most programs spectacularity prevails over content, and the viewer is a mere passive element against what happens with reading, where he actively participates.
In summary , all the negative effects that were already known with television are now being enhanced by social networks, and the results are already beginning to be seen in current high school graduates (whether they are studying at university or not), first generations that have been completely crossed. through social networks and television at the same time, with increasingly worse levels of spelling, vocabulary, oral expression, text comprehension and problem solving (in developed countries and also in emerging countries - such as Argentina-).
Those of us who are teachers with several years of experience (primary, secondary or higher) can amply attest to the problem. Undoubtedly public policies will have to catch up soon, otherwise the issue will continue to worsen. In any case, the change in the media is structural and irreversible, with an increasing proportion of people using digital media for information and study, which is not bad (the problem is not newspapers or digital books, but the number of hours spent on social networks). Perhaps the counterbalance should come from the school, but it still seems to me that public planners have not found much around the problem, beyond the famous “daily reading time at school”, that much has not changed the situation.
