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Reading for pleasure, which has declined among young people in recent decades, enhances thinking and engages the imagination in a way that visual media such as video games and television do not, Greenfield said.

"Studies show that reading develops imagination, induction, reflection and critical thinking, as well as vocabulary," Greenfield said. "Reading for pleasure is the key to developing these skills. Students today have more visual literacy and less print literacy. Many students do not read for pleasure and have not for decades."

Television, movies, video games, mobile phones, and the Internet have all been identified as the culprits that rot the brain, desensitize, delude, and generally ruin the minds of the young (and perhaps everyone else too).

The media and popular press point clearly to new technologies as the cause of this decline but also, ironically, as the source of the “new literacy.” Texting, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and countless other technologies and media are widely seen as undermining or displacing literacy