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new language, reading screens, or practicing a golf swing. Neural connections that are not reinforced atrophy, while other circuits are strengthened through repeated use. Canadian neuroscientist Donald Hebb summed up this complex process with this memorable shorthand: “Neurons that fire together, wire together” (Doidge 2007, 63). Appealing to the neuroplasticity argument, critics such as Mark Bauerlein (2008), Nicholas Carr (2010), and Sven Birkerts (2015) have argued that we are making ourselves stupid. By repeatedly clicking and surfing our way through websites, spending as few as 10 seconds on each page, we are changing our brains, they claim, and not for the better. In effect, when we make the shift from a print-based to a digital culture, we risk becoming addicted to novelty and speed and correspondingly less capable of sustained, concentrated thought. This is another version of the complaint once made in the early 1970s about Sesame Street: that the television program’s short segments, quick changes, and high intensity would produce a generation that is overstimulated and easily dis- tracted. But now critics can point to neuroscience as an ally in making their case. Developmental psychologist Maryanne Wolf (Wolf and Barzillai 2009) has used the term “deep reading” to describe the type of reflective engagement and close reading that she thinks is endangered by the many hours we spend in dis- tracted skimming, scanning, and scrolling. She says, “What we read and how deeply we read shape both the brain and the thinker.” In an environment of stable and linear print, Wolf argues, “Little is given to the reader outside the text. For that reason, readers must engage in an active construction of meaning, in which they grapple with the text and apply their earlier knowledge as they question, analyze, and probe.” Through this sustained, active engagement, readers develop the right kinds of reading circuits in the brain. In contrast, the “fluid, multimodal” digital reading environment is an “uncensored, unedited maelstrom of anything and everything that is always available and capable of diverting one’s attention.” Digital reading of hypertext therefore “has the potential to form a more passive ... learner”—or what Wolf calls the “distracted reader.” Two widely cited books have elaborated upon Wolf’s argument about neural circuits, particularly her metaphor of “deep reading,” in order to sound the alarm about the distracted reader: Nicholas Carr’s book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (2010) and Sven Birkerts’s Changing the Subject: Art and Attention in the Internet Age (2015). In the latter book, the sub- ject that is changing is us—the contemporary user of digital technology. In the chapter “You Are What You Click,” Birkerts uses such terms as “unregulated floods of information,” “inundation,” and “deluge” to describe the electronic flows that swamp the digital reader. Clicking through from website to website, the reader gains “amazing lateral speed” but loses depth. “The upshot,” says Birkerts (2015, 92–93), is that we have “extraordinary movement between points,” a movement that creates an “expectation very much at odds with the narrowing intensity and focus for any more sustained kind of development.” Making a paral- lel argument about the erosion of conversation by digital reading and writing, technoculture researcher Sherry Turkle in Reclaiming Conversation (2015) reports that addiction to smartphones has produced people that lack empathy, are panicked by solitude or boredom, connect only superficially with others, can’t 1.1 Henny Penny and the Case for Reading / 3