WSJ.com:
... the act of reading observes a gradient of awareness. Familiar sentences rendered on lucid e-ink screens are read quickly and effortlessly. Unusual sentences with complex clauses and odd punctuation tend to require more conscious effort, which leads to more activation in the dorsal pathway. All the extra cognitive work wakes us up; we read more slowly, but we notice more. Psychologists call this the 'levels-of-processing' effect, since sentences that require extra levels of analysis are more likely to get remembered.
E-readers have yet to dramatically alter the reading experience; e-ink still feels a lot like old-fashioned ink. But it seems inevitable that the same trends that have transformed our televisions will also affect our reading gadgets. And this is where the problems begin. Do we really want reading to be as effortless as possible? The neuroscience of literacy suggests that, sometimes, the best way to make sense of a difficult text is to read it in a difficult format, to force our brain to slow down and process each word. After all, reading isn't about ease—it's about understanding. If we're going to read Kant on the Kindle, or Proust on the iPad, then we should at least experiment with an ugly font.
Every medium eventually influences the message that it carries. I worry that, before long, we'll become so used to the mindless clarity of e-ink that the technology will feed back onto the content, making us less willing to endure challenging texts. We'll forget what it's like to flex those dorsal muscles, to consciously decipher a thorny stretch of prose. And that would be a shame, because not every sentence should be easy to read.
