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  3. Susan Greenfield’s recent comments about how modern technology and social me

Susan Greenfield’s recent comments about how modern technology and social me

游客2023-11-01  19
问题     Susan Greenfield’s recent comments about how modern technology and social media are changing the way our brains work have caused quite a stir in the academic community: these changes, she claims, are as important to understand as climate change. One interesting way of assessing the value of her statements is to look at the nature of the "reading brain".
    To begin with, the human brain was never meant to read. Not text, not computer screens, not tablets. There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain’s protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way. Indeed, every time we learn a new skill, that is what we are doing.
    New capacities, however, change us, as the evolutionarily new reading circuit illustrates. After we become literate, we literally " think differently" about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out. The brain’s plasticity allows an intrinsic variety of possible circuits— there is no set genetic programme. For example, in the case of reading, this means there will be different reading brains depending on various environmental factors: the Chinese reading brain, for example, uses far more visual areas because there are more characters to learn.
    In 1968, Marshall McLuhan started conducting an experiment at Fordham University, in which he made students watch the same film on a cinema screen and a television, and analysed their different reactions: the characteristics of the medium, his hypothesis went, will always influence what parts of the reading circuit are employed and to what extent. At the time, many laughed off McLuhan’s theory, but it stands out like an apt prelude to the debate we are having today. The characteristics of a medium like the Internet invite the reader to move from one stimulus to the next in rapid fashion. The characteristics of a medium like the book invite more focused attention.
    Like Professor Greenfield, my research group and I are most concerned with how the acquisition of new capacities changes human development. In the case of reading, we know that the "expert reading brain" as we know it includes a beautifully complex circuit that integrates simpler decoding skills with what I call " deep reading" processes such as critical analysis, analogical thought, inference and insight.
    The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text. The reality is that today’s expert reading circuit was formed under very different conditions and with different mediums than those of our childrens’.
    The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information. Will an immersion in digitally-dominated forms of reading change the capacity of the young readers to form and to develop their deep reading processes? No one at this moment possesses the evidence to answer these questions, but our children’s development and our species-intellectual evolution require that we confront them. [br] The author has drawn a conclusion that______.
选项 A、today’s children cannot develop complex skills
B、deep-reading process will be lost in the end
C、our species evolution demands speed reading
D、online reading depletes analytic thought
答案 D
解析 推断题。文章从大脑阅读功能的背景知识说起，旨在说明阅读媒介和环境对人类阅读能力及分析思维能力的影响。根据文章最后两段可知，在作者看来，在线阅读等快速阅读方式会影响分析思维的发展，故[D]为答案。文章强调的是阅读方式对分析思维能力的影响，而不仅仅是在担心孩子们的阅读能力的发展，故[A]属于以偏概全，排除；作者只是说深度阅读能力的发展面临威胁，是亟待解决的问题，但不能因此说这种能力最终会丧失，因此[B]属于过度推断，排除；而[C]“我们种族的发展进化需要快速阅读”则与作者的观点相悖，而且过度夸大阅读能力的作用，故也排除。
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