The evidence is clear: those who don’t read or who outsource their essays to AI lose the facility for complex thought – Photo Writing Forward
Not Reading or Writing Would Be Unthinkable
By James Marriott
Writing is the most reliable (and often the most painful) method our species has devised of transforming half-formed notions and stray fancies into rigorous, logical thought. I cannot be the only opinion columnist to have discovered that ideas that sounded impressive when I was declaiming them in the pub have a habit of looking lame and illogical when transferred to that most stark and inhospitable of environments, the blank page. Ah… perhaps that’s not what I think, after all. Time to try again.
A paper published l ast week by scientists at MIT restates Didion’s thesis with less elegance but with more empirical rigor. The researchers used wearable brain scanners to measure the cognitive activity of a group of students who used AI to help them write their essays and a group who did the work themselves. The AI-assisted writers “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic and behavioral levels” compared with those who wrote their own essays. They needed to write in order to think.
The MIT study is an important reminder of the central importance of reading and writing to thinking, at what is a historically dangerous time for literacy. Human writing is threatened by AI and reading is threatened by addictive screens. According to a study published last month, childhood reading has fallen to an all-time low. Indeed, almost half of British adults did not read a book in the past year and a recent report found adult literacy “declining or stagnating in most OECD countries”. The link has not been definitively proven but it’s hard to believe it’s merely an accident that average IQ has begun to decline, and that reasoning and problem-solving skills have fallen among adults and teenagers since the 2010s.
Complex and profound thought — the kind of thought on which modern society is built — can only be produced by reading and writing. In his pioneering book Orality and Literacy, the philosopher of language, Jesuit priest (and minor hero of mine) Walter Ong argued that the advent of literacy in Ancient Greece precipitated an intellectual revolution that gave us first the philosophy of Plato and eventually all the subsequent riches of Western civilization.
Ong observed that oral cultures — which lack writing and thus communicate only through speech — must devote enormous cognitive energy to preserving knowledge. If you can’t write anything down, the only way to retain information is to remember it. Inevitably, this takes up vast intellectual resources and limits both the quantity and the quality of available thought. To preserve knowledge, you must “think memorable thoughts”; if a thought is not memorable it will eventually disappear. Oral cultures thus rely on rhyme, meter, cliché formulations, strong emotion and outlandish characters to fix information in the minds of listeners. Such societies are good at producing epic poems of heroes and monsters, but they tend not to produce masterpieces of analytic philosophy.
Importantly, Ong argued, speech is ephemeral and imprecise. Spoken sentences cannot be refined and redrafted for maximum precision before being presented to an audience. And they disappear the moment they have been uttered. By contrast, the invention of writing allows authors to formulate complex and precise statements; readers can then reflect on them, interrogate them and add to them, building ever more complex and abstract ideas of their own.
Writing also favors logical argument over mere assertion — a written text allows us to flit back and forward as we read, to check if an argument is proceeding logically. In a book it looks weird if the author flatly states something to be true and then rushes off to an unconnected thought, though the habit is quite normal in conversation. The advent of literacy vastly expanded both the quality and quantity of thoughts available to our species.
More than two millennia later, no information technology yet invented has been able to match the sophistication of the book. Indeed, the internet, with its bewildering chaos of disconnected trivia, only serves to emphasize the sophistication of books that are not dense in information but rich in context and logical connections. And unlike scrolling, reading is not a merely passive activity. Books demand engagement, concentration and thought. As the writer Ezra Klein recently put it, when reading a book you are not merely “downloading information into your brain”, you are “spending time grappling with the text, making connections”. Reading is thinking. To adapt Didion again: we read to find out what we think.
As Ong and his followers speculated, if we stop reading and writing we risk returning ourselves to some of the intellectual limitations of preliterate societies. It hardly requires special powers of observation to notice that our digital culture — dominated more and more by the attention-shattering, context-destroying short-form video — is growing less keen on complex logical argument and more fond of outsized memorable characters, endlessly repeated clichés and dangerously strong emotions.
Reading and writing are the cornerstones of thought: serious reading, I suspect, is the one habit that unites virtually every man and woman of genius who has ever lived. It may turn out that to abolish reading and writing is almost to abolish human genius. We must think very carefully before ceding our minds to screens and AIs. - The Times
