Carl Hendrick wrote an article titled Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us (17 April 2025).
« a cultural inflection point. People are reading more words, but fewer books and as a result, they’re reading in an increasingly shallow way. »
« In its place, we are cultivating habits of skimming, scanning, and superficial intake. Modes better suited to consuming than to understanding… The reading brain, once forged by sustained attention and deep engagement, is now adapting to an environment built for speed, distraction, and artificial fluency. »
« what I fear they’ll miss is not literature’s beauty but its resistance. The way it trains the mind to slow down, to reflect, to tolerate ambiguity. To reside in the discomfort of the interstitial and be ok with it. The way it sharpens perception by refusing to simplify. »
« Reading is not natural. It is an acquired skill, hard-won, an evolutionary detour that turned the human brain into a space for rarefied thought; reflection, argument, imagination. And yet, in a digital culture of continuous partial attention, this capacity is undoubtedly slipping from us. »
« But the costs of this shift are not merely literary or aesthetic. They are cognitive, emotional, and civic… Reading deeply strengthens the capacities that underlie all learning: memory, inference, comprehension, and sustained attention. »
« Trained by fragmented inputs and rewarded for speed rather than depth, the mind becomes conditioned to expect ease, immediacy, and constant stimulation. »
« To lose this habit at a societal scale is not a small thing. It is to unmoor ourselves from the slow, accretive processes that form character, judgment, and self-knowledge. A culture that stops reading deeply does not merely lose its stories, it risks losing the very tools by which it interprets them. Reflection, nuance, ambiguity, these are not incidental by-products of reading. They are its gifts. And as they fade, so too does our capacity to meet the complexity of the world with anything other than reaction. »
« Sherry Turkle has written extensively on the consequences of this shift. In Reclaiming Conversation, she argues that digital communication encourages performance over presence: we craft ourselves not to connect, but to be seen. The result is what she calls “the edited self,” curated for likes, detached from genuine reflection. In place of inner life, we have brand management. In place of thought, performance. »
« The tragedy is not that we are reading less, but that we are being fed more, and that what we are fed no longer expects much from us anymore. It demands clicks, not contemplation; affirmation, not argument. It asks us to skim, to share, to move on. In doing so, it erodes not only our attention, but our appetite for complexity, for difficulty, for truth. The reader is no longer a co-creator of meaning, but a consumer of impressions. In such a system, the very possibility of serious thought begins to look anachronistic. »
« Maryanne Wolf introduces a subtle but urgent concept into the discourse on reading: cognitive patience. It is, at heart, the willingness to linger in difficulty. The capacity to stay with a complex sentence, a knotty idea, a layered argument long enough for meaning to emerge. »
« We are not merely losing our capacity for deep reading, we are losing our tolerance for the conditions under which deep thought becomes possible. In the absence of this patience, complexity is not engaged, but avoided. Ambiguity is not tolerated, but dismissed. We become allergic to intellectual difficulty, not because it is beyond us, but because we have forgotten how to sit with it. »
« This is the crisis of complexity. And its implications are far-reaching. A society that can no longer read complex texts may soon find itself unable to think complex thoughts or to recognise when they are missing. In that context, reading becomes not just a cognitive act, but a civic one: a rehearsal for the intellectual stamina that democracy requires. »
« We are moving from what Birkerts calls “vertical” reading: deep, devotional, recursive engagement with a single text, toward “horizontal” reading: skimming, browsing, grazing across sources, surfaces, and screens. »
« In the age of platforms and prompts, of AI authors and infinite feeds, we are reading more but understanding less. »
« Short-form, SEO-optimised, and emotionally neutered, much of what passes for writing today is tailored not for the attentive reader but for the indifferent algorithm. Its purpose is not to reveal, disturb or nourish, but to rank. »
« This isn’t just about TikTok or Twitter. It’s about how the medium reshapes the mind, how digital habits dull our appetite for complexity, and how a civilisation that forged itself through the long-form written word might forget what it means to think. »
« This shift from deep reading to shallow skimming, from authored insight to algorithmic noise is no accident. It is the product of platforms, of incentives, of a technological ecology indifferent to meaning. »
« In Stand Out of Our Light, James Williams introduces the notion of “adversarial design” … these systems are engineered to exploit our cognitive vulnerabilities, hijacking attention, nudging behaviour, and diverting us from our higher-order goals. »
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