RESHAPING BRAINS TO A READERLESS FORM

Have you seen this article in “The Atlantic”? Or more to the point, did you read it?

Likely not, which is in keeping with the piece – the very long piece, which is all about how humans don’t have the attention span to read anymore.

This article (see https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/?fbclid=IwY2xjawTXXoxleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETF2R3k5S0pUZ1VIbGNrbWRuc3J0YwZhcHBfaWQQMjIyMDM5MTc4ODIwMDg5MgABHi4O7G6pLTRJzbr3Yyp00R9sD5ni8dtyl1zR80willn1orrfAd6VEMN9sj2H_aem_UzxOuiWLDJYnqTwOp5tBOg) is freaking brilliant, and it has a few excerpts that frame the whole thing. To wit:

“Reading has never been natural. Humans have no innate cognitive machinery designed to string letters into words and connect them to their real-world analogues. To read, people had to repurpose regions of their brain used for speech and object recognition.

“In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.”

People’s attention spans have been systematically reduced to a shadow of what they once were. I read today that the average film now is only 88 minutes long, down from 2 hours in the golden age of movies. People just can’t stay with anything that long anymore.

I further read where university admissions officers are admitting kids to college who have not advanced beyond 10th grade level on basic proficiency examinations.

This Atlantic article starts with the intellectual decline that overcame the world as a result of the destruction of the library at Alexandria, Egypt. There scholars worked to create a central knowledge base of human understanding.

Unfortunately, it was all recorded on papyrus scrolls. Insects and mice consumed the documents and human beings lost the knowledge. The Dark Ages began.

This article suggests that we have entered a new Dark Age, one from which we cannot return because our lack of literacy is literally reshaping us.

We are becoming a new form – a form that can’t concentrate on anything longer than short-form video.

The importance of reading to human development is immeasurable, as will be the depth of human loss if we don’t all rebel against the human trend and crack a book. In fact, a hundred each, and no Young Adult Fiction.