Patrick Morgan’s article on how the “digitization” of modern life has transformed isolation and solitude led me to think about how all this noise has been driving us toward a certain cognitive superficiality.

We live in an age of constant distraction. The constant streams of notifications, headlines, and updates fragments our attention, leaving us with a persistent sense of overload and stagnation. We feel informed about everything, yet we rarely understand anything in depth.

In this landscape, the act of reading a book — not just for entertainment, but as a deliberate, profound practice — is a powerful counterpoint. Far from being a passive activity, immersive reading is a dynamic process that can literally reshape our minds. It provides surprising and transformative answers to the challenges of modern life.

Yes, this is yet another article praising the virtues of reading — not the superficial reading we do when scrolling through our social media timelines, but deep, deliberate reading. It’s an article about how reading can reinvent our brains, our empathy, and our very lives. Thank you, Patrick, for the extra motivation to finally finish writing it.

Your brain reading books is different from your brain reading screens

In order to understand why deep reading is so important, we must first understand what happens in our brains when we read. One of the most fascinating scientific points made by the neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf is that, unlike vision or spoken language, reading isn’t a natural human capacity. There is no “reading gene.” In order To learn to read, the brain must effectively become an ingenious electrician, creating a new circuit by “recycling” and connecting areas that were originally intended for other functions, such as object recognition and sound production.

Because this circuit is built rather than predetermined, it’s profoundly malleable and influenced by the medium in which we read. Reading on paper tends to promote sustained attention, spatial memory (we remember the physical location of a passage in the book), and the slow, analytical cognitive processes of “deep reading.” In contrast, screen reading, with its hyperlinks, notifications, and encouragement of multitasking, promotes skimming, keyword searching, and a “cognitive impatience” that leads us to jump from source to source.

Wolf’s main concern is that skimming will become our default reading mode. In practice, this means risking our ability to follow a complex argument in a book, to feel the weight of a character’s decision, or to formulate an original, profound thought rather than simply reacting to a stimulus. If the brain circuit for skimming becomes dominant, we risk atrophying the critical thinking, analysis, and empathy capacities that deep reading nurtures.

“The possibility that critical analysis, empathy and other deep reading processes could become the unintended ‘collateral damage’ of our digital culture is not a simple binary issue about print vs digital reading. It is about how we all have begun to read on any medium and how that changes not only what we read, but also the purposes for why we read. Nor is it only about the young. The subtle atrophy of critical analysis and empathy affects us all.” — Maryanne Wolf in Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound

This neurological reality sets the stage for understanding what we lose—and what we can reclaim—through deep reading. The benefits extend far beyond mere information processing; they fundamentally reshape how we understand ourselves and others.

Reading as empathy training

The first and perhaps most unexpected benefit of deep reading is its power to cultivate empathy. The idea that reading fiction is merely an escape from reality is profoundly mistaken. Wolf, citing theologian John S. Dunne, describes deep reading as an act of “passing over.” When we immerse ourselves in a narrative, we temporarily leave the confines of our own self to enter another person’s consciousness—the character’s. We experience their thoughts, share their emotions, and see the world through their eyes.

This isn’t just a poetic metaphor; it has a solid neurological basis. Research cited by Wolf reveals that when we read about textures, our somatosensory cortex (the brain area responsible for touch) activates. When we read about movement, our motor areas fire. Our brain doesn’t simply process words; it actively simulates the experiences described in the text. Isn’t that fascinating?

As cognitive scientist Keith Oatley suggests, fiction functions as a “moral laboratory,” allowing us to explore complex social and emotional scenarios in a safe environment.

However, this process of immersion is never a loss of identity, but rather an expansion. As Dunne observes, the return to ourselves is an essential part of the experience.

This “empathy training” is one of reading’s most vital benefits. In an increasingly polarized world, the ability to genuinely understand another person’s perspective is a fundamental necessity. Fiction offers us the practice we need. But this training is only effective if we approach books not as comfort, but as challenge—which brings us to the transformative power of great literature.

Great books are transformative

In our consumer culture, it’s easy to treat literature as just another entertainment product, something to be passively consumed. But professor and critic Mark Edmundson argues that this approach betrays literature’s true purpose. Works that endure weren’t written to comfort us; they were written to offer us “live options” and to challenge how we live.

To explain this process, Edmundson uses the concept of “final narratives,” adapted from philosopher Richard Rorty. A final narrative is the set of beliefs, values, and stories we use to make sense of our lives. It might be the belief that “hard work always pays off” or that “family comes first.” Great literature confronts us with other final narratives—Achilles’s, Hamlet’s, Isabel Archer’s—and forces us to question the solidity of our own.

The true test of a work, according to Edmundson, isn’t whether it entertains us, but whether its worldview is a viable alternative to ours. The question we should ask a book is: “Can you live it? Can you put it into practice?” This echoes critic Harold Bloom’s idea that deep reading is a “quest for a difficult pleasure” that demands effort and transforms us. That “difficult pleasure,” in turn, requires the kind of “cognitive patience” that, as we’ve seen, our screen culture is actively eroding. Literature’s purpose is as serious as life itself.

But how does literature create space for this transformation? Part of the answer lies in the unique psychological freedom fiction provides.

Fiction as a safe zone for dangerous thoughts

Fiction offers us a unique and protected space for what critic James Wood calls “non-actionable thoughts.” This means that, within a novel’s pages, we can explore ideas, perspectives, and emotions — including the darkest or most controversial — with the assurance that the act of thinking is separated from the act of doing. We can enter a murderer’s mind and examine their internal logic without any real-world consequences.

This access to another’s consciousness is an almost divine power that real life rarely grants us. Fiction allows us to peer into a character’s most intimate thoughts, witnessing their contradictions and secret desires. We learn about the complexity of human motivation in a way that external observation never would allow.

This safe zone for thought is what generates what critic Harold Bloom describes as a “surplus of life.” Great authors, Bloom argues, “more than enlarge life.” When we read, we don’t just live our own limited existence, but also the lives of countless others. This surplus allows us to expand our understanding of the human condition far beyond the boundaries of our personal experience.

“We read Shakespeare, Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Dickens, Proust, and all their peers because they more than enlarge life.” — Harold Bloom in How to Read and Why

This expansion of consciousness through fiction teaches us something else equally vital: how to truly see the world around us.

Literature as a driver of observation

In a world that encourages us to skim across our phone screens, literature teaches us a forgotten art: “serious noticing,” another term from James Wood. Great writers are masters at noticing the specific, revealing details that give texture and meaning to life. By reading them, we train our own capacity for observation.

Wood illustrates this with an example from Saul Bellow’s novel Seize the Day. The main character notices an elderly man’s “large but light” elbow. This observation is astonishingly precise. The elbow is large because the man is thin and the joint protrudes; but it’s light because he’s frail, composed only of skin and bone. In a single sentence, Bellow captures the essence of old age’s fragility. Literature teaches us that this level of perception is available everywhere, if we slow down enough to look for it.

This practice of “serious noticing” is a powerful antidote to the culture of dπPistraction. It’s the direct opposite of infinite scrolling, which trains us to see without truly noticing. From a neurological standpoint, serious noticing is the practice that builds and strengthens the deep reading circuits described by Maryanne Wolf. Literary reading forces us to slow down and see the world with greater depth, to find meaning in details, and to appreciate the richness of what novelist Henry James considered to be art’s essence.

Final words

Far from being an obsolete practice, deep reading emerges as a profoundly active and formative act. It’s an exercise that trains our empathy, challenges our values, reconfigures our brain circuits, and sharpens our perception of the world in ways that quick, superficial information never will.

Reading doesn’t offer us easy answers, but something far more valuable: the capacity to formulate deeper questions and the patience to analyze complexity. It returns us to ourselves, but transformed: with richer neural circuits, deeper empathy, more examined values, and a sharper perception of reality’s fabric.

Patrick Morgan’s observation about how digitization has transformed solitude resonates deeply with me. As someone who has been a passionate reader since adolescence, I find myself constantly struggling with the very problems this article describes: fragmented attention, the difficulty of sustained concentration, the pull of the screen over the page. Writing this piece was itself an act of resistance — a reminder that the battle for deep reading isn’t won once, but must be fought daily.