The Irish Times view on Ireland Reads Day: embrace the silence

> UCLA neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf has shown that deep reading, defined as sustained immersion in a text, builds the cognitive circuits required for critical analysis, empathy and perspective-taking in ways that skimming, scrolling and short-form video simply cannot. Research also shows it reduces the rate of cognitive decline by 32 per cent in older adults. The habits cultivated by serious reading, such as tolerating ambiguity, holding competing ideas in mind and deferring judgment, are precisely what is required of citizens in a democracy under pressure from those who prefer that we do none of these things. > > Deep reading is not confined to the novel. A reader absorbed in a work of history or biography, in the compression of a short story, the argument of a long-form essay or a serious piece of journalism, in the concentrated attention that a poem demands, is exercising the same circuits and reaping the same rewards.