There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.

Maryanne Wolf

Categorized in : New Way Brain Reading

Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.

Maryanne Wolf

act realize miracle reading

Fluency is the developmental process that connects decoding with everything we know about words to make the meaning of the text come to life. Fluency is a wonderful bridge to comprehension and to a life-long love of reading.

Maryanne Wolf

words reading love life

Deep reading refers to a whole continuum of processes that include some of the most important things about thinking and how we connect thought to what we read - critical analysis, analogical reasoning, how we infer from the text, how do we take another's perspective.

Maryanne Wolf

deep perspective reading thinking

Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.

Maryanne Wolf

memory great society technology

Every opportunity to practice is a gift to the developing reader. Practice, practice, practice, in every form and medium!

Maryanne Wolf

every gift practice opportunity

After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read.

Maryanne Wolf

never research simple brain

The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.

Maryanne Wolf

principal information society culture

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don't read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds.

Maryanne Wolf

video-games parents look children

There's an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice.

Maryanne Wolf

lose reading age brain

The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.

Maryanne Wolf

the-most-important important knowledge

We humans invented literacy, which means it doesn't come for free with our genes like speech and vision. Every brain has to learn it afresh.

Maryanne Wolf

free vision speech brain

What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think.

Maryanne Wolf

why how think change

Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.

Maryanne Wolf

you language reading time

There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.

Maryanne Wolf

know you reading opportunity

Reading is a bridge to thought.

Maryanne Wolf

bridge thought reading

I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing.

Maryanne Wolf

more day worry way

I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.

Maryanne Wolf

child development education work

We are the worst of fools if we do not teach every child to become truly expert, deep readers.

Maryanne Wolf

fools deep child worst

We need to discern what it is that requires reflection in our lives and in what we read and how we read it.

Maryanne Wolf

read need how reflection

The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text.

Maryanne Wolf

well more learning reading