It's to the best of our knowledge from PRI.

I'm Anne Strange Champs.

I was one of those kids who didn't just read books.

I lived inside them.

I knew the landscape of Narnia better than my own neighborhood.

Anne of Green Gables and Frodo and Jane Eyre, they were my best friends.

For most of my life, the stories inside books have seemed as real and compelling as the

world outside.

But lately, something's been happening that kind of terrifies me.

Books just don't pull me inside the way they used to. I mean, I pick up a book

and I just can't quite settle in. And then I started hearing the same thing from other people.

So what is this? Late onset dyslexia? Middle-aged ADHD? Or just my imagination?

It is not age. It is not imagination.

What you're experiencing is what researchers call the new reading,

which is skimming, browsing, word spotting, zigzagging,

all of the sorts of ways that, in fact, are the antithesis of the readers we've been.

This is Marianne Wolfe.

She's one of the world's leading experts on the neuroscience of reading.

And here's what she thinks is happening.

All that time we spend reading online, checking Facebook and Twitter, answering email, searching Google.

She thinks that's actually rewiring our brains. And she warns that we're not just reading

differently, we're also thinking differently. And here's where I think it's really most

...