To be honest, I'm a bit skeptical and am waiting for study results on this. The reports are that unbelievable. Of course, this isn't uniform among that population. But the incidence is a bit too frequent for my comfort. I don't remember any other generation complaining so much about the children like the current one. If I were asked to guess the culprits, I would pick social media and AI slop. But again, I'm waiting for a rigorous scientific confirmation.
But if it's true, I am scared to think about the emotional and neurological mess these kids are going to find themselves in.
My own mental model for this, which I'll share in case it helps anyone, is this: If we take Lacan's theories of the linguistic subject seriously, that "[our] unconscious is structured like a language," then we need linguistic embedding to exercise and activate our core being. By reading, we engage with the word in a way that the brain is forced to build, interpret, and ascribe meaning entirely from the signifier chain itself, absent any context in the register of the image. By encountering novelty in language, we increase the scale and relational interconnectively within the set of signifiers that make up our linguistic graph. Mappings are created and reinforced, and identifier is added to both concept and materiality in the real, allowing us to encompass more of lived experience within the very core of our innate selfness. Thus reading is an act of continual becoming, countering age, which past a certain point has an effect of unbecoming.
c-oreills•1h ago