Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

by Maryanne Wolf

there is a final moment in the reading act when an arms-wide expanse in the reader’s mind opens up and all our cognitive and affective processes become the stuff of pure attention and reflection. Cognitively and physiologically, this pause is not a quiet or static time. It is an intensely active moment that can lead us even deeper into insights from the text or beyond them, as we sift past perceptions, feelings, and thoughts in pursuit of what the psychologist William James thought of and Philip Davis described as “that invisible generative place. . . .65 the invisible presence of mind behind, within, and between its words.” Although it feels semi-sacrilegious to amend their thoughts, I would add “the invisible presence of the mind that reads behind, within, and between the words.”