Quotes from Maryanne Wolf

inflexible muteness of written words doomed the dialogic process Socrates saw as the heart of education.

There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the "friends" who inhabit them.

The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert's famous description of the child's "grasshopper mind"6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically "hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.

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.

Increasing numbers of developmental researchers observe that when parents read stories on e-books with their children, their interactions frequently center on the more mechanical and more gamelike aspects of e-books, rather than the content and the words and ideas in the stories. Most parents are simply better at fostering language and helping to clarify concepts when they read physical books to their preschool children.

An insight is a fleeting glimpse of the brain's huge store58 of unknown knowledge. The cortex is sharing one of its secrets. —Jonah Lehrer

Whatever our age, we can be changed by the lives of others if we learn to connect the whole of the reading circuit with our moral imagination.

Harvard physicist John Huth writes about the more universal importance of knowing where we are in time and space and what happens when we fail to connect the details of that knowledge into a larger picture. "Sadly, we often atomize knowledge32 into pieces that don't have a home in a larger conceptual framework. When this happens, we surrender meaning to guardians of knowledge and it loses its personal value.

There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests. Behind our screens, at work and at home, we have sutured the temporal segments of our days so as to switch our attention from one task or one source of stimulation to another. We cannot but be changed. And we are—

communication occurs despite the solitary nature of the reading act—

the powerful nature of what entering the lives of others can mean for our own lives. Drama makes more visible what each of us does when we pass over in our deepest, most immersive forms of reading. We welcome the Other as a guest within ourselves, and sometimes we become Other. For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally.

Anyone who still believes the archaic canard that we use only a tiny portion of our brains hasn't yet become aware of what we do when we read.

Less happily, however, we are beginning to observe the direct and indirect influence of the digital word-spotting, text-grazing reading patterns of contemporary readers—how things are read—on how texts are being written. When publishers are forced to consider the needs

Shared attention, as Charles Taylor wrote, is the beginning of the great dance of language that joins one generation to the next, not forced attention. Knowing research about the development of literacy is a very good thing; knowing what to attend to in one's own child overrides everything I can ever say—or write—about any medium or any approach. There are so many things we all have

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.2 —David Ulin

Indeed, "there are as many connections"27 in the reading brain's circuitry "as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.

When language and thought atrophy, when complexity wanes and everything becomes more and more the same, we run great risks in society politic-- whether from extremists in a religion or a political organization or, less obviously, from advertisers.

Just as I worry that in their overreliance on external sources of information, our young will not know what they do not know, I worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our attention to complex issues, the unsuspected diminishing of our ability to write, read, or think past 140 characters. We must all take stock of who we are as readers, writers, and thinkers.

I worry that we are even closer to the stripping away of complex thoughts when they do not fit the memory-enfeebling restriction on the number of characters used to convey them.

For reasons we've explored, children struggling to read aren't going to be helped by the one-size-fits-all approach that is typical in so many schools. Rather, we need teachers who are trained to use a toolbox of principals that they can apply to different types of children.

In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.

Num meio que nos defronta continuamente com um excesso de informações, a grande tentação de muitos é se retirar para depósitos conhecidos de informações facilmente digeríveis, menos densas, intelectualmente menos exigentes. A ilusão de estarmos informados por um dilúvio diário de informações dimensionadas eletronicamente para o olho pode dificultar uma análise crítica de nossas realidades complexas.

So much of a child's life is lived for others. . . . All the reading I did as a child, behind closed doors, sitting on the bed while the darkness fell around me, was an act of reclamation. This and only this I did for myself. This was the way to make my life my own.

Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria37 of experiences, information, books we have read.