B (1:52)

The very tools we use to communicate and learn are rapidly changing. From the classrooms where children first learn to read to the way scientists share critical information with everyone. Literacy is evolving. In episode 32, we shared research showing that people who used AI like ChatGPT to write essays had less brain activity and remembered less compared to those who wrote on their own. Using AI made things easier, but their brains didn't get as much exercise, so they didn't learn as much. We also talked about how handwriting versus typing affects how children learn letters and words. So building on that, we'll continue exploring literacy and look deeper into two how modern tech is transforming the way our brains read and process information, and how scientists experiences during the pandemic reshaped public engagement. Then we'll take a look at a new probiotic for the ocean. I'm Dr. Samantha Amien and this is Curiosity Weekly. It probably comes as no surprise that the COVID 19 pandemic had a huge indelible cultural impact In a lot of ways, it put science in the spotlight, but not without a personal cost for the scientists, clinicians, journalists and communicators who were sharing that science. A new study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications looks at the impact that that's had on science outreach today. In 2021, the peak of the pandemic, the journal Nature surveyed over 300 scientists and science communicators who had commented publicly on COVID 19. More than two thirds shared that they had negative experiences afterwards and 15% said that they received death. I mean, I was getting daily harassments via Instagram DMs. And for high profile scientists like Dr. Anthony Fauci from the US and Dr. Theresa Tam from Canada, it got to the point where they needed security. It wouldn't be surprising if all of that made scientists a bit more hesitant to share their work publicly. So enter that new study. The team surveyed over 4,200 scientists at German universities and research institutions. It looked at how going through this experience changed their feelings about talking and connecting with the public today. They found that hostility towards scientists was most common online, with 30% of respondents who talked about COVID online saying they experienced some level of insults, threats of violence or physical attacks afterwards and if it wasn't happening to them directly. About half of the respondents said they had a close friend or colleague who had and these secondhand experiences were the strongest predictor in the study of whether someone felt talking about science publicly was risky. Science has no shortage of hot button topics throughout its history that have had scientists nervous to get into the Spotlight. I mean, GMOs, stem cell research and vaccines. These days, MRNA vaccines are getting all the heat, but scientists and science communicators, I guess were resilient. According to the study, scientists are still willing to share their work, mostly through in person events and less so online. Which fair, I get it. Though the team didn't collect reasons why scientists were wary about online media, other studies have like this one that surveyed scientists in Austria. It found that it boiled down to three primary reasons. One, during the pandemic, scientists were already dealing with a lot, so jumping into fast paced online communication just added to their stress. On top of that, many didn't feel like they had the right skills or training to handle tricky topics in media. Plus, the online world can be pretty harsh. But with science becoming increasingly polarized and health misinformation running rampant, we definitely need to work together to open more doors for people to engage with science safely. So hey, here's an idea. We're doing just that. So why not share curiosity weekly with your friends?

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Listen to Expedition Unknown on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. In today's fast paced digital world, the way we read and even how our brains process information is undergoing a huge transformation. So many of us have smartphones in our pockets with us all the time, social media bite sized content at our fingertips. These digital platforms may be reshaping reading habits, refocusing our attention, and evolving the very definition of literacy itself. As we adapt to new forms of care communication, we probably want to figure out how these changes are influencing the way we absorb and interpret information. Our senior producer, Teresa Carey is joined by two leading experts on the science of reading and learning, Dr. Maryanne Wolf, a neuroscientist, author and an advocate for children and literacy. She's the Director of the center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and information studies and Dr. Daniel Willingham, professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, whose research on attention and learning offers crucial insights into how we think, focus and remember. Here they are.

E (8:18)

I'm so glad you're both here to do this with me. I'm really excited.

D (8:22)

Me too.

C (8:22)

Happy to be here.

E (8:24)

And of course, I have here on my desk a copy of Reader Come Home, the Reading Brain in a Digital World by you, Marianne Wolf. And then I also have a copy here, Outsmart yout why Learning is Hard and how youw Can Make It Easy by Daniel T. Willingham. And this is why learning is hard and how to make it easy. Doesn't everybody want to know that?

C (8:45)

Right?

E (8:45)

Yeah, sure do. Okay, well, in reader Come home, Dr. Wolf, you wrote that we're not only what we read, we're how we read. And you talk about this idea that we're losing stamina for the immersive and the reflective process of long form reading and instead kind of replacing it with skimming and multitasking. So could you elaborate on what your research reveals about how digital culture, digital reading, is reshaping the reading brain. And then, Dr. Willingham, I'll follow up with you with maybe you could talk about the cognitive psychology perspective and tell us what are the most significant cognitive processes at risk as reading to clients.

D (9:27)

Well, let me begin by saying the first line that I ever wrote for the public about three reading is, we were never born to read. Our brain was programmed genetically to speak, to see, to think, to run all these things, but never to read. Now, I'm telling you this because to understand how reading changes, we have to understand that it's a plastic circuit that connects all these amazing processes. And these processes are time consuming. So when we just begin, if you will, to think about the reading brain, we begin with attention that goes into visual processing, that connects to language processes, that very importantly connects to conceptual cognitive processes and affective processes. Now, all that sounds like, oh, that's a lot. Well, it is a lot. And we can allocate time to all those processes or, and this is what is the how we read part. Or we can skim and do what is actually a very rudimentary use of the reading brain circuit. Now, our eye movement research colleagues show us that in an age that is inundated by information that we tend to skim what we read, especially if we read on a screen. Now, what that means is that we can get the gist of the information, but we have not taken our attention and allocated it to the really important aspects of reading. So when we talk about how we read, it's how we utilize the multiple processes that are available to us. That all of us have developed in an elaborated circuitry, if you will. I call the deep reading circuitry. It involves. Now, here's where Dan and I are going to probably talk together about this, but it involves taking what we know and using our analogical reasoning and. And say, how does that fit what I'm reading? So there's like this analogy made between what you know and what you're reading. And then you use critical thinking, empathy, inference. All of this is what we get when we read at a deep level. That's the how. But if we don't, if we don't utilize those, if we're just skimming, we actually short circuit what we have developed. Are we maintaining and developing that reading brain circuit, or is it following the atrophy of the platitude in neuroscience? Use it or lose it. So there's that big aspect for we who are adults. But probably my primary role in life is to worry about children and the next generation. So my probably even larger concern is that that beautiful elaborated reading brain won't develop in a world in which we farm out the effort that goes into developing that circuitry. So I have two developmental worries. So, Dan, I throw it to you.

C (13:13)

Yeah. Let me start with this question about what's at risk. Educators perceive a huge problem today. Surveys of teachers in early elementary and mid elementary report overwhelmingly that students do not have the reading stamina they had even a handful of years ago. Here's, I think, a pretty typical story. What we do online very often calls for or encourages rapid shifts of attention. So when you're on your phone, you're constantly flipping between different applications. Okay. Combine that with what we know about the brain, which is that the brain is plastic. The brain adapts. So the story is you become so used to flipping attention between things, you. Your brain learns to do that, and you lose the ability to focus attention. Okay, so that's the story. And researchers have been investigating that feverishly for about 10 years. This is a very difficult research problem because this is something that happens over the course of years, and it's not something that you, as an experimenter, can actually control. So you end up doing a lot of correlational studies. We all know correlation is not causation, but let's start there. The most straightforward prediction you would make is people who spend more time online are less good at controlling their attention than people who spend less time online. That seems mostly not to be true. Okay, so what could be going on? If everybody feels like, Dan, that's all very nice, but you May not be able to find it in your studies, but I'm seeing it in the classroom. Let me point out there are other possibilities. So we're starting with the idea that students can't pay attention. That's different than students not wanting to pay attention. And there are two main hypotheses about how that might work. One is keys on this idea that what digital life has done is really made us used to instant gratification.

E (15:28)

So you're talking about this drop in attention that teachers are observing, and they're like, what's going on? And you're saying there was research done to see if it was that they were losing their ability to pay attention, and that didn't pan out in the research. So then you thought, well, what if it's then their willingness to pay attention or their desire to. Their motivation to. And that seems to be the stronger reason why there's this drop in attention.

C (15:53)

Yes, that seems to be better supported. And so one idea is the one I just outlined, that having to wait is worse than it used to be. There's another hypothesis which I actually think might be even stronger, which is that people are more easily bored today. And so the hypothesis is, when you have your phone in your pocket, there's always YouTube videos. There's always like, I could be playing Fortnite, like, you know, whatever it is that would be appealing to you.

E (16:22)

Dr. Wolff, in your writing, you've described reading as a bridge to other lives, other perspectives, other times. And you touched on this a little bit. And so I wonder what we could lose psychologically and culturally if people can no longer get through demanding poems like Beowulf or nuanced stories like To Kill a Mockingbird. Yeah. What happens to our capacity for empathy and critical thinking when that bridge is no longer crossed?

D (16:52)

I would love to talk about the fact that one of the most important aspects of deep reading is deep feeling, if you will. Deep understanding of others. We pass over into the thoughts and feelings and perspectives of others. We visit historical periods we might never have understood. We encounter lives that are so different from our own that it gives us a bridge outside our own imagination into the realities of other lives. And this is so important in a world that has become increasingly polarized, in which the perspectives of others have been sometimes diminished by calling them mothers. I think they're could be a profound effect on people if they became more and more aware that we are all others and that this important aspect of humanity is fostered by this deep reading process.

E (18:06)

I see there's this relationship between Reading and writing as inseparable. And so if reading is increasingly delivered to us in SHORTHAND through excerpts, TikTok videos, bite sized content, writing also seems to be following suit. There's, you know, AI chatbots, ChatGPT. People don't have to labor over phrasing or idea formation when technology can just do it for us. What do you see as perhaps the cognitive and developmental consequences of this shift for writing skills and for original thought? What do we risk losing in terms of intellectual rigor if we don't wrestle with those ideas?

D (18:50)

Oh, wrestling is the exact term. Wrestling builds the brain. We have this rapacious appetite in our culture for efficiency when in fact we underestimate totally the importance of wrestling. Now you can have ChatGPT give you something, but that does nothing for the building of your brain. Your own brain effort builds and elaborates the circuitry of the, not just the reading brain, but the writing brain. So the most important thing I will say is not that there is no reason or use for any of the technologies that can help us, but rather we will neglect the effect on what our own brain needs. Just as every musician and sports person needs effort. Practice is what helps build that writing circuit.

C (19:53)

I think about it from an instructor's perspective. Instructors can't make students think anything. What we do is we give students assignments, we encourage activities that we think are going to result in certain types of thoughts. So we're trying to get content to stick in students memory. We're trying to develop skills. So in my introductory class I give a lot of tests because students have to get basic vocabulary under the belts. They're basic concepts they have to understand. In my senior seminar, they need to be trying to coordinate ideas into much larger arguments. Writing is an ideal assignment for that. Writing A paper of 10 pages, 20 pages requires exactly what I just described. Doing that cognitive work is very, very difficult work. That's why it's so beneficial. It's very understandable that a sizable proportion of students will avoid doing that cognitive work. When faculty members say, well, you can use it for brainstorming. You can use ChatGPT to help you with your outline. This is like walking arm in arm with an alcoholic into a bar and saying, let's just have wings. This is a dumb idea.

E (21:22)

I was going to say let's just have one sip.

C (21:23)

Yeah, let's just. Same idea. Yeah, sniff the whiskey. Let's not drink any of it. I mean it's just, it's setting yourself up for failure.

E (21:33)

Yeah, yeah. Have you, have you used ChatGPT?

C (21:36)

Oh, yeah, no, I use ChatGPT all the time.

E (21:38)

Sure.

C (21:39)

I think for, you know, for certain things, it's. It's terrific.

D (21:43)

Yeah.

C (21:43)

But I'm not using CHAT GPT to produce content where the expectation, the reason I've been set this task of producing content is for my own cognitive benefit.

E (22:00)

Okay.

B (22:01)

Yeah.

E (22:01)

So do you. I mean, given the realities of digital culture, do you have any practical strategies for. In the classroom or for families at home or even on a bigger level, like a policy level? Do you have any recommendations for fostering habits of deep, sustained reading?

D (22:17)

For me, the data inspire me to believe that the best use of the first 10 to 12 years of our children's lives is to be immersed in print with an emphasis on expanding those deep reading processes and making them there. And then when we are assured of their, if you will, consolidation, that we can then systematically, through our teachers, through our teacher's knowledge, teach how to use those deep breathing processes in the different mediums that are going to be available now. If you ask me this in five years, I may have changed my mind. I may.

E (23:04)

Deanne, I see you shaking your head. You're in agreement here.

C (23:07)

This one, yeah, very much. And I was shaking my head no when Marian was speculating. Maybe I'll change my mind in five years. I'm betting you won't. I know the data on which you're basing that, and it's hard to see how that conclusion would turn around, is my guess.

E (23:28)

As a parent trying to foster reading and deep thinking, deep learning with my child, how much do I allow them to be on the iPad each week? And how much do I say no?

C (23:38)

Here's the metaphor that I use is that when my children were young, is like my children really like watermelon. If I tell my children, you know, watermelon is what you're having for dessert tonight, My kids are happy if I say there's watermelon, but there's also candy. Watermelon doesn't stand a chance. And reading is watermelon, and anything on a screen is candy. As far as my kids were concerned, they're going to pick it every time. And so the number, the magic number of restricting candy is basically, I want my kids to remember, I actually do really like watermelon. Like, this is really fun. And so. Yeah. But I'm also, as you can hear, a realist about it.

E (24:25)

Well, I have just one more question. Do you think that we're moving into a time where reading and really digging into these complex texts just isn't the norm anymore. And most people are getting their information from quick posts instead of these books and long articles. Given all of this, I want to talk about what this really means for people being able to read and think critically and have that empathy that you talked about.

D (24:48)

I think we have already seen digital algorithms in which you are fed time after time, those subjects, issues, topics that will support your original view or whatever you in fact were looking up. And so what we have is a system wide support of what would have been a perspective rather than an entry into multiple perspectives. And it's like corroborating the familiar rather than expanding knowledge beyond the familiar. It could have been, and I think in the minds of the early AI and digital leaders, it could have been the opposite, that it would be the source of connecting to multiple sources of knowledge.

C (25:46)

Yeah, broad literacy is a relatively new phenomenon. So it could be that we are in that sense moving backwards to something that was much more broadly true a couple of hundred years ago, where a decent percentage of the populace is sort of functionally literate in a limited sense that they can go to the drugstore and differentiate cough syrup from other medicines. You know, and that's important, that's useful. But they're not able to do any sort of deep reading. Many, many circumstances are quite different than they were 200 years ago. So it's, it's a little hard to predict what the how that's going to come out. I do worry about people's ability if they're not used to deep thinking and.

E (26:36)

Deep reading, or if they're not motivated for that deep reading or if they're not motivated. As we talked about earlier. I really appreciate this.

D (26:44)

Absolutely.

C (26:45)

Yeah, absolutely. Happy to talk to you.

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Why choose a sleep number Smart bed.

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Sleep number does that cools up to eight times faster and lets you choose your ideal comfort on either side your Sleep number setting it's the sleep number biggest sale of the year all beds on sale up to 50% off the limited edition smart bed plus free premium delivery with any smart bed and adjustable base ends Labor Day. All Sleep number Smart beds offer temperature solutions for your best sleep. Check it out at a sleep number store or sleepnumber.com today.

B (27:27)

As if our good friends the coral reef don't have enough to deal with, they've been battling stony coral tissue loss disease for over a decade and current treatments aren't enough. But good news. Scientists recently discovered a treatment that could help friendly microbes aka probiotics in 2014, stony coral tissue Loss disease, or SCTLD for short, emerged off the coast of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, affecting over 30 different species of corals and quickly spreading to surrounding reefs in the Caribbean. It causes the soft tissue of corals to die and leaves its skeleton exposed. Researchers had a hunch that it's related to the presence of harmful bacteria in the environment. So in collaboration with the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, scientists wanted to see if they could help corals fight off the disease by giving them helpful bacteria, similar to the idea of probiotics for people. They looked at the bacteria living on corals that don't get sick and found One Coral called MCH17 from Great Star Coral that seemed special. It makes all sorts of antibacterial compounds and in lab tests seem to stop the spread of the disease, making it a great candidate for treatment. And that's all well and good in the lab, but researchers had to figure out a way to apply the probiotic to coral out in the wild. So they tested two ways to get probiotics onto sick coral off the coast of Fort Lauderdale. One way was to put a paste on the disease spots. The other was to cover each coral with a plastic bag, add the probiotics to the bag and let it sit for two hours before taking the bag off. Kind of like giving the coral a mini spa treatment. The researchers monitored these reefs for two and a half years and eventually found that the probiotics effectively slowed down the spread of the disease in the plastic bag test. Now the research isn't over and they'll need to figure out if this treatment will work on other corals and in other regions. But it shows probiotics may be one more tool in the toolkit to keep our reefs healthy. For Warner Bros. Discovery Curiosity Weekly is produced by the team at Wheelhouse DNA. The senior producer and editorial correspondent is Teresa Carey. Our producer is Chiara Noni. Our audio engineer is Nick Karisimi. And head of Production for Wheelhouse DNA is Cassie Berman. And I'm Dr. Samantha Ewin. Thanks for listening.

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