Cognitive Patience

 Wisdom is not contemplation alone, not action alone, but contemplation in action. 

- John S Dunne

Julian Gridhan reviews Maryanne Wolf's book Reader, Come Home: the reading brain in a digital world. This is one of the most underappreciated and intangible benefits humanity reaped because a fraction of humans (and that fraction is going down each year) were deep readers. 

Wolf's coins a phrase for this "cognitive patience": 

Then, in Letter Three, Wolf asks the central question in the book: ‘Deep Reading: is it endangered?’ 

It is the nature of attention … that underlies large, unanswered questions that society is beginning to confront. Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focussing of our attention? 

She is deeply concerned about everything we will lose if we let slip what she calls the cognitive patience we gain when we immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books. She cites the remarkable conversation between Marilynne Robinson and Barack Obama in which the then President called Robinson a specialist in empathy, another word for the kind of attention to other human beings that can help us become responsible citizens and create better societies:

The consistent strengthening of the connections among our analogical, inferential, empathic, and background knowledge processes generalises well beyond reading. When we learn to connect these processes over and over in our reading, it becomes easier to apply them to our own lives, teasing apart our motives and intentions and understanding with ever greater perspicacity and, perhaps, wisdom, why others think and feel the way they do.  

 

The Deep Reading Brain in a Digital World from Atlanta Speech School on Vimeo.