Why can’t we read anymore?

Last year, I read four books.

The reasons for that low number are, I guess, the same as your reasons for reading fewer books than you think you should have read last year: I’ve been finding it harder and harder to concentrate on words, sentences, paragraphs. Let alone chapters. Chapters often have page after page of paragraphs.

It just seems such an awful lot of words to concentrate on, on their own, without something else happening. And once you’ve finished one chapter, you have to get through another one. And usually a whole bunch more, before you can say “finished,” and get to the next. The next book. The next thing. The next possibility. Next, next, next.

Still, I am an optimist. Most nights last year, I got into bed with a book — paper or electronic — and started. Reading. One word after the next. A sentence. Two sentences.

Maybe three.

And then … I needed just a little something else. Something to tide me over. Something to scratch that little itch at the back of my mind — just a quick look at e-mail on my iPhone; to write, and erase, a response to a funny tweet from William Gibson; to find, and follow, a link to a really good article in the New Yorker. E-mail again, just to be sure.

I’d read another sentence. That’s four sentences.

It takes a long time to read a book at four sentences per day.

And it’s exhausting. I was usually asleep halfway through sentence No. 5.

I’ve noticed this pattern of behavior for a while now, but I think last year’s completed book tally was as low as it has ever been.

It was dispiriting, most deeply so because my professional life revolves around books: I started LibriVox (free public domain audiobooks) and Pressbooks (an online platform for making print and e-books), and I co-edited a book about the future of books.

I’ve dedicated my life one way or another to books. I believe in them, yet, I wasn’t able to read them.

I’m not alone.

When the people at the New Yorker can’t concentrate long enough to listen to a song all the way through, how are books to survive? In a New Yorker podcast recently, the host was interviewing writer and photographer Teju Cole.

Host: “One of the challenges in culture now is to, say, listen to a song all the way through, we’re all so distracted, are you still able to kind of give deep attention to things, are you able to sort of engage in culture that way?”

Teju Cole: “Yes, very much so.”

When I heard this, I felt like hugging the host. He couldn’t even listen to a song all the way through before getting distracted. Imagine his bedside pile of books.

I also felt like hugging Teju Cole. It’s people like Cole who give us hope that someone will be left to teach our children how to read books.

Dancing to distraction

What was true of my problems reading books — the unavoidable siren call of the digital hit of new information — was true in the rest of my life as well.

My 2-year old daughter, dance recital. Pink tutu. Cat ears on her head. Along with five other 2-year-olds, in front of a crowd of 75 parents and grandparents, these little toddlers put on a show. You can imagine the rest. You’ve seen these videos on YouTube. The cuteness level was extreme, a moment that defines a certain kind of parental pride. My daughter didn’t even dance, she just wandered around the stage, looking at the audience with eyes wide. It didn’t matter that she didn’t dance, I was so proud. I took photos and video with my phone.

And, just in case, I checked my e-mail. Twitter. You never know.

I find myself in these kinds of situations often, checking e-mail or Facebook, with nothing to gain except the stress of a work-related message that I can’t answer right now in any case.

It makes me feel vaguely dirty, reading my phone with my daughter doing something wonderful right next to me, like I’m sneaking a cigarette.

Or a crack pipe.

Once I was reading on my phone while my older daughter, 4 years old, was trying to talk to me. I didn’t quite hear what she had said. I was reading an article about North Korea. She grabbed my face in her two hands, pulled me toward her. “Look at me,” she said, “when I’m talking to you.”

She is right. I should.

Spending time with friends or family, I often feel a soul-deep throb coming from that perfectly engineered wafer of stainless steel, glass and rare-earth metals in my pocket: Touch me. Look at me. You might find something marvelous.

This sickness is not limited to when I am trying to read, or once-in-a-lifetime events with my daughter.

At work, my concentration is constantly broken: finishing writing an article (this one, actually), answering client requests, reviewing and commenting on new designs, cleaning up copy on the About page. Contacting so and so. Taxes.

E-mail, of course, is the worst, because e-mail is where work happens, and even if it’s not the work you should be doing right now it may well be work that’s easier to do than what you are doing now, and that means somehow you end up doing that work instead of whatever you are supposed to be working on. And only then do you get back to what you should have been focusing on all along.

Dopamine and digital

It turns out that digital devices and software are finely tuned to train us to pay attention to them, no matter what else we should be doing. The mechanism, borne out by recent neuroscience studies, is something like this:

New information creates a rush of dopamine to the brain, a neurotransmitter that makes you feel good.

The promise of new information compels your brain to seek out that dopamine rush. With functional MRIs, you can see the brain’s pleasure centers light up with activity when new e-mails arrive.

There is rarely a beautiful universe on the other side of the e-mail refresh button, and yet it’s the call of that button — and all the buttons like it — that keeps pulling me out of the work I am doing, out of reading books I want to read.

Why they’re important

When I think back on my life, I can define a set of books that shaped me — intellectually, emotionally, spiritually. Books have always been an escape, a learning experience, a savior, but beyond this, greater than this, certain books became, over time, a kind of glue that holds together my understanding of the world. I think of them as nodes of knowledge and emotion, nodes that knot together the fabric of my self. Books, for me anyway, hold together who I am.

Books, in ways that are different than visual art, music, the radio, or even love, force us to walk through another’s thoughts, one word at a time, over hours and days. We share our minds for that time with the writer’s. There is a slowness, a forced reflection required by the medium that is unique. Books re-create someone else’s thoughts inside our own minds, and maybe it is this one-to-one mapping of someone else’s words, on their own, without external stimuli, that give books their power. Books force us to let someone else’s thoughts inhabit our minds completely.

Books are not just transferrers of knowledge and emotion, but a special kind of tool that flattens one self into another, that enable the trying-on of foreign ideas and emotions.

This suppressing of the self is a kind of meditation, too — and while books have always been important to me on their own (pre-digital) merits, it started to occur to me that “learning how to read books again,” might also be a way to start weaning my mind away from this dopamine-soaked digital detritus, this meaningless wash of digital information, which would have a double benefit: I would be reading books again, and I would get my mind back.

And, there are, often, beautiful universes to be found on the other side of the cover of a book.

And so, a change

The problem, more or less, is identified:

I cannot read books because my brain has been trained to want a constant hit of dopamine, which a digital interruption will provide.

This digital dopamine addiction means I have trouble focusing — on books, work, family and friends.

And so, starting in January, I started making some changes. The key ones were:

No more Twitter, Facebook, or article reading during the workday (hard).

No reading of random news articles (hard).

No smartphones or computers in the bedroom (easy).

No TV after dinner (it turns out, easy).

Instead, go straight to a quiet room or to bed, and start reading a book — usually on an e-reader (it turns out, easy). The shocking thing was how quickly my mind adapted to accommodate reading books again. I had expected to fight for that concentration — but I didn’t have to fight. With less digital input (no pre-bed TV, especially), extra time (no TV, again), and without a tempting digital device near at hand … there was time and space for my mind to settle into a book.

What a wonderful feeling it was.

I am reading books now more than I have in years. I have more energy and focus than I’ve had for ages. I have not fully conquered my digital dopamine addiction, but it’s getting there. I think reading books is helping me retrain my mind for focus.

And books, it turns out, are still the same wonderful things they used to be. I can read them again.

Hugh McGuire spends his workdays wrestling with books and the Web. He’s the founder of Pressbooks.com and LibriVox.org. Find him on Twitter @hughmcguire, or through an infrequent e-mail newsletter about books, technology and reading here: http://tinyletter.com/hughmcguire

Editor’s note: Ideas, a new essay series, lets Bay Area leaders share their insights into business topics every other Monday. To submit an essay, send a proposal to business@sfchronicle.com.

A version of this essay first appeared on Medium.com.