Global Roaming with Geraldine Doogue and Hamish Macdonald The Matter of Facts: Why our brains are vulnerable to disinformation
Mar 23, 2026
Maryanne Wolf, director of UCLA’s Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice and expert on the reading brain. She explores how AI deepfakes and information overload confuse our senses. She discusses how digital habits reshape brain circuits for reading. She contrasts print’s immersive deep reading with online skimming and the social risks of reduced critical attention.
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Bondi Image Manipulation Changed The Narrative
- An edited Bondi police image was cropped to make officers look frozen, which reshaped public perception after the attack.
- Hamish and Geraldine recount the photo went viral and inverted the actual actions of officers who ran toward danger.
Reading Builds A Unique Deep Reading Circuit
- Reading creates a new brain circuit that supports deep comprehension, empathy, inference, and critical thinking.
- Maryanne Wolf explains print's affordances force time-consuming attention allocation, unlike digital skimming which shortchanges those circuits.
Screens Encourage Skimming Not Immersion
- Digital affordances promote skimming and continuous partial attention, reducing immersion and deep processing.
- Wolf cites eye movement and imaging studies showing screens make skimming the norm and weaken connections used for deep reading.
