When We Stop Reading, We Forget How to Think
What happens to a civilization when it loses the habit of deep reading?
The Modern Crisis: “The End of Thinking”
“Most of our students are functionally illiterate. This is not a joke.”
— Hilarius Bookbinder (pseudonym), cited in Derek Thompson’s “The End of Thinking”
Earlier this year, writer Derek Thompson posed a troubling question in his essay The End of Thinking: What if we are witnessing the slow collapse of literacy itself? He quotes a college professor lamenting that many students can no longer follow an argument through several pages of prose.
Thompson also cites several disturbing trends:
In 2004, 56% of American adults read at least one book per year; by 2022 Gallup found that number of books read per adult had fallen sharply from 18.5 to 12.6.
Reading time among young adults has dropped by more than half since 2005
If reading and writing are tools to build cognitive strength, then it’s no surprise that as these decline, so does cognitive ability. Literacy and numeracy scores are falling across the West for the first time in decades, as are science, reading and math scores.
Thompson argues that we are living through a thinning of thought – a slow erosion of our collective ability to follow complex arguments, deal with uncertainty or engage with ideas that stretch beyond 289 characters.
Financial Times columnist John Burn-Murdoch wonders whether we have already “passed peak brain power”—just as we build machines to think for us. At a time when our tools become super intelligent, we risk becoming less so.
Yet this isn’t the first time civilization has flirted with forgetting how to think. After the fall of the Roman Empire, we were rescued by the rediscovery of their books.
The Manuscript That Awakened the World
In 1417, a papal secretary named Poggio Bracciolini wandered into a German monastery and unearthed a long-lost manuscript by the Stoic poet Lucretius. On the Nature of Things had lain dormant for over a thousand years. It was well ahead of its time, introducing such revolutionary ideas that the universe was made up of invisible atoms, that countless worlds existed beyond our own, and introduced key principles from which modern astronomy, physics and evolutionary biology would eventually grow. The book helped shift Europe from a feudalistic closed world view to one rooted in observation and reason. Within a few short decades, the rediscovery of classical manuscripts helped ignite the Renaissance, the rebirth of art, science and human inquiry into the workings of the natural world.
At a more fundamental level, the rediscovery of books was the awakening of rational thinking, a belief that the world was knowable through observation and reason, consistent with natural laws rather than blind faith and divine intervention. With the dissemination of texts, knowledge once the purview of a limited few, was democratized. Wide-scale reading became a mental technology—training people to reason, to sustain attention, to imagine worlds unseen and to challenge existing thought. Books gave us a tool to liberate humanity on a scale never seen before in the history of civilization.
Cathedrals – The TikTok of the Middle Ages
Before the 15th Century, fewer than one in ten Europeans could read or write. They gained their understanding of the world through images and what they were told. Want to learn about the bible? Go to your local church and look at the stained-glass windows or listen to the priest’s weekly sermon.
The stained-glass windows of medieval cathedrals were the TikToks of their age: dazzling visual stories that taught the masses what to believe, how to behave, and whom to obey. They compressed belief into spectacle, trading reflection for instant conviction. Weekly sermons served as the soundtrack, reinforcing the same narratives through repetition and moral drama. These media worked because they bypassed analysis and went straight to emotion. They were, in every sense, tools of cognitive influence — shaping collective imagination without ever asking the listener to question or think independently.
Two centuries after the invention of the printing press, literacy rates were 60-70%, representing an unprecedented cognitive and cultural transformation. Books enabled revolutions in science, politics and culture. Copernicus’s and Galileo’s books began a scientific revolution, revealing that the Earth was not the center of creation. Newton’s book Principia showed that the universe was governed by universal laws and did not require divine intervention. The writings of Buffon and Lamarck provided the foundation for Charles Darwin to write the Origin of the Species, a radical break from the Bible’s view of creation and humanity’s place within it.
These books broke the shackles that until then kept humanity chained to ignorance and orthodoxy controlled by the select few.
The printing press didn’t just spread knowledge; it spread a way of processing reality. It liberated thinking, creating a citizenry capable of abstraction and argument. It built the modern mind.
Just as the printing press enabled the collective mind for depth, our screens may be rewiring it for speed. Six centuries later, our challenge is not to recover lost manuscripts but to recover the mental discipline those books once taught us.
The Brain That Learned to Read
Neuroscience confirms what the early humanists recognized: reading doesn’t just fill the mind—it reshapes it.
In a landmark Science study, neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene and his colleagues found that literacy reorganizes the brain. Adults who learned to read later in life showed strengthened connections between visual and language regions, enhanced auditory processing, and refined awareness of speech sounds. The act of reading fuses vision and language into a single circuit for understanding.
Dehaene calls this “cortical recycling”: the brain repurposing existing networks for a new cultural invention. The printed page recruits systems for pattern recognition, speech, and memory, binding them into a neural architecture for imagination and reasoning.
Even in adulthood, this transformation occurs—a testament to the brain’s lifelong plasticity. Reading, then, is not only cultural but biological. It trains the mind to think in layers, to integrate perspectives, to hold ideas in tension.
Guess what Taylor Swift, Bill Gates, Barack Obama, Paul McCartney, Reese Witherspoon and Martin Scorsese have in common? They are all avid readers. Each credits books with expanding their perspective – whether it’s history, politics, the arts, science or social justice. Their creative and intellectual range is the consequence of reading deeply and widely.
The Age of Distraction: The Brain Unlearns
In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr argued that the internet is remapping our brains for speed, not depth. Each scroll, click, and notification rewards quick shifts of attention. The neural circuits that once formed through long-form reading are being rewired for novelty and reaction.
Carr calls this the “juggler’s brain”—agile, endlessly stimulated, but rarely still. The same plasticity that once made us readers now trains us to flit from stimulus to stimulus, losing the thread of sustained thought. In a prescient 2008 Atlantic article deftly titled Is Google Making Us Stupid? Carr said “Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I skip along the surface like a guy on a jet ski.”
Meta-analyses of dozens of studies show that people comprehend and retain more when reading on paper than on screens, particularly for complex, expository material. The scrolling, hyperlinking structure of digital text taxes working memory and interrupts comprehension. We finish with the illusion of knowing, but not the depth of understanding.
When the Mind Forgets Its Discipline
Deep reading is mental training. The brain, like a muscle, weakens when underused.
Mounting research show that cognitive activity—including reading—builds cognitive reserve, the brain’s capacity to adapt and remain efficient as it ages.
In a twenty-one-year New England Journal of Medicine study, older adults who read or played board games had nearly half the risk of developing dementia compared to those who did not. A separate Neurology study found that frequent cognitive activity slowed decline even when brain pathology was present. And a Yale study of more than 3,600 adults discovered that people who read books regularly lived almost two years longer than non-readers—and that cognition mediated this survival advantage.
Deep reading doesn’t just enlarge the mind—it fortifies it.
And when the discipline of reading erodes, both the individual and the culture lose resilience.
The Return of Shallow Thought
The invention of printing created the cognitive conditions for democracy: citizens who could follow arguments, weigh evidence, and imagine alternatives.
As deep reading declines, those capacities fade. Slogans replace reasoning; outrage replaces understanding. We become more reactive, less reflective—moved by images rather than ideas.
A post-literate society is not an egalitarian one. It’s a potential return to feudalism—rule by those who control the symbols while the rest consume the pictures. In this new digital order, algorithms, images and influencers shape belief much as clerics and stained glass windows once did, dispensing easy certainties to those too distracted to question them.
Reading as a Civic and Cognitive Act
In the fifteenth century, monks preserved the manuscripts that would one day revive civilization. Our task is subtler but in no way less urgent: to preserve the capacity for deep thought itself.
Each time we sit with a book—patient, absorbed, following an argument or a story—we are rebuilding the neural circuits of reason and empathy that society depends on. Reading is not an escape from the world; it is an act of resistance against its shallowing.
The monks of the Renaissance saved the manuscripts. Ours is the task of saving the mind.
Pick up a book. Read deeply. Think slowly. Our future may depend on it.
Further Reading
Avni Bavishi, Martin D. Slade & Becca R. Levy. (2016). A Chapter a Day: Association of Book Reading with Longevity.
Nicholas Carr. (2008). Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Nicholas Carr. (2011). The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains.
Stephen Greenblatt. (2011). The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.
Jeffrey M. Jones. (2022). Americans Reading Fewer Books Than in Past.
Jason Roberts. (2023). Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life.
Derek Thompson. (2025). The End of Thinking.
Robert S. Wilson et al. (2013). Life-span Cognitive Activity and Cognitive Aging.
Spot on Jeff! You are so right. It doesn’t have to be just books.
Spot on Rick. And deep reading is not limited to books. Subscribe to a good journal or magazine that offers in depth and well reasoned articles. A good 6-8 page article can trigger new perspectives. Read articles outside of your current top interests? Read the opposite of your current beliefs. Join a book club. Value thinking and perspective making. We can wish and hope.