Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
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Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West
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On the one hand, a relatively small group of people will retain, and intentionally develop, the capacity for concentration and long-form reasoning. On the other, a larger general population will be effectively post-literate — with all the consequences this implies for cognitive clarity.
Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures.
Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
kids who are exposed to more than two hours a day of recreational screen time have worse working memory, processing speed, attention levels, language skills and executive function than kids who are not.
Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
just like the negative health impacts of junk food overconsumption, the cognitive harms of digital media will be more pronounced at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale.
Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
The resulting patterns of content consumption form us neurologically for skimming, pattern recognition and distracted hopping from text to text — if we use our phones to read at all.
Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
Los patrones resultantes de consumo de contenido nos moldean neurológicamente para el escaneo, el reconocimiento de patrones y el salto distraído de texto en texto —si es que usamos el teléfono para leer.
Social media platforms are designed to be addictive, and the sheer volume of material incentivizes intense cognitive “bites” of discourse calibrated for maximum compulsiveness over nuance or thoughtful reasoning.
Opinion | Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good
Long-form literacy is not innate but learned, sometimes laboriously. As Maryanne Wolf, a literacy scholar, has illustrated, acquiring and perfecting a capacity for long-form, “expert reading” is literally mind-altering. It rewires our brains, increasing vocabulary, shifting brain activity toward the analytic left hemisphere and honing our capacity
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La alfabetización en formatos largos no es innata sino aprendida, a veces laboriosamente. Como ha ilustrado Maryanne Wolf, una estudiosa de la alfabetización, adquirir y perfeccionar la capacidad de lectura extensa y “experta” altera literalmente la mente. Reconfigura nuestro cerebro, aumenta el vocabulario, desplaza la actividad cerebral hacia el hemisferio izquierdo analítico y agudiza nuestra capacidad de concentración, razonamiento lineal y pensamiento profundo. La presencia generalizada de estos rasgos contribuyó a la aparición de la libertad de expresión, la ciencia moderna y la democracia liberal, entre otras cosas.
Think of this by comparison with patterns of junk food consumption: As ultraprocessed snacks have grown more available and inventively addictive, developed societies have seen a gulf emerge between those with the social and economic resources to sustain a healthy lifestyle and those more vulnerable to the obesogenic food culture. This bifurcation
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Piensa en esto comparándolo con los patrones de consumo de comida chatarra: a medida que los snacks ultraprocesados se han vuelto más disponibles e ingeniosamente adictivos, las sociedades desarrolladas han visto surgir un abismo entre quienes tienen los recursos sociales y económicos para sostener un estilo de vida saludable y quienes son más vulnerables a la cultura alimentaria obesógena. Esta bifurcación tiene una marcada dimensión de clase: en todo el Occidente desarrollado, la obesidad se ha vuelto fuertemente correlacionada con la pobreza. Temo que lo mismo ocurra con la marea de la postalfabetización.