Quotes from Maryanne Wolf

Can an individual reader consciously acquire various circuits, much like bilingual speakers who read different scripts?

Will the quality of our attention change as we read on mediums that advantage immediacy, dart-quick task switching, and continuous monitoring of distraction, as opposed to the more deliberative focusing of our attention? What concerns me as

When we reflect that "sentence"10 means, literally, "a way of thinking" . . . we realize that . . . a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought. . . . It is a pattern of felt sense. —Wendell Berry

We seem to be moving as a society from a group of expert readers with uniquely personal, internal platforms of background knowledge to a group of expert readers who are increasingly dependent on similar, external servers of knowledge. I want to understand the consequences and costs of losing these uniquely formed internal sources of knowledge without losing sight of the extraordinary gifts of the abundant information now at our fingertips.

Como santo Tomás de Aquino, concibo el desacuerdo como el lugar donde «el hierro con hierro se afila».

If attention in the young child, which is spasmodic and exploratory by nature, becomes all the more attenuated because of constant input, those of us who are researchers have to figure out the downstream effects on memory and other aspects of cognitive development.

The medium is the messenger to the cortex, and it begins to shape it from the very start.

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.

But what if our capacity to perceive is actually decreasing because we are confronted with too much information, as the philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote?

What if we have become virtually addicted to the heightened sensory stimulation that composes much of our daily lives and cannot stop ourselves from pursuing it incessantly, as Judith Shulevitz suggests in6 The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time and as technology experts in "persuasion design" principles know very well?