Just sitting and reading for a few minutes can't hurt.

If I might refer to my master's thesis (that earned quite a bit of skimming while I prepared this column), submitted six and a half years ago, I noted then the response of Stanford researcher Keith Devlin to the question of the year (2000) posited by the Edge web site, "What is Today's Most Important Unreported Story?". Devlin chose to write about The death of the paragraph. He wrote:

We may be moving toward a generation that is cognitively unable to acquire information efficiently by reading a paragraph. They can read words and sentences — such as the bits of text you find on a graphical display on a web page — but they are not equipped to assimilate structured information that requires a paragraph to get across.

I've reread that short essay numerous times over the years, fearful that there's too much truth in Devlin's claim. He continues:

Half a century after the dawn of the television age, and a decade into the Internet, it's perhaps not surprising that the medium for acquiring information that both age groups find most natural is visual nonverbal: pictures, video, illustrations, and diagrams.

But though Devlin tells us that the paragraph is no longer "the most natural" medium for acquiring information among young people, he isn't telling us that this is a result of a restructuring of the brain, of a different way of perceiving reality. He's telling us that youth simply aren't receiving enough practice in this important method of information acquisition, and that they should.

Go to: No lack of additional culprits, or
Go to: A function of structure?,
Go to: Dr. Who?, or
Go to: Can we every feel at home?, or
Go to: Carrying cognitive baggage from the old country