The Digital Paleolithic Tribe

Reading a physical book in a slow, deliberate and careful manner sharpens a type of innovative, sympathetic, creative and critical thinking that is otherwise hard for humans to access./nWithout a concerted effort, we will not develop those skills./nIf we avoid the slow and deliberate reading of actual physical books, if we mainly consume information on screens, constantly keeping up with the news on Twitter, looking at what's going on in Instagram, jumping around, highly engaging websites or following links on social media, even very highly educated people will do this and convince themselves, I'm really up on things. I know what's going on. I'm jumping back and forth between the substack quotes that I saw quoted in other tweets. You feel like you're really engaged, but you're not doing the type of reading that supports innovative, empathetic, creative and critical thinking./nSo what happens is the sophistication with which you understand and later make sense of information is decreased. And your ability to apply sophisticated thinking in other contexts is also atrophied.