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

by Maryanne Wolf

My letters are also an invitation to look at other changes, more subtle ones, and consider whether you have moved, unaware, away from the home that reading once was for you. For most of us, these changes have begun.

reading brain over the last decade and move from there: human beings were never born to read.3 The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it. The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain’s repertoire.

What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace. In a span of only six millennia reading became the transformative catalyst for intellectual development within individuals and within literate cultures. The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought, it is our best-known path to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species. There is much at stake in the development of the reading brain and in the quickening changes that now characterize its current, evolving iterations.

One of the most important current outgrowths of my research involves working toward global literacy15, where I publicly advocate and help in the design of digital tablets as one means of ameliorating nonliteracy, particularly for children with no schools or in inadequate ones.

There are no shortcuts for becoming a good reader, but there are lives that propel and sustain it. Aristotle wrote that the good society16 has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation.

Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the artist in society to that of the canary in the mines: both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us.

It seemed to me that they would not be18 “my readers” but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass. . . . I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.

from the most unlikely and circumscribed of observation posts, her second-floor window on Main Street in Amherst, Massachusetts. When she wrote “Tell all the truth, but tell it slant,2 Success in Circuit lies,” she could never have known about the brain’s many circuits.

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.

Louis Pasteur wrote, “Chance comes only to the prepared mind.”

Only if we continuously work to develop and use our complex analogical and inferential skills will the neural networks underlying them sustain our capacity to be thoughtful, critical analysts of knowledge, rather than passive consumers of information.

“What good is this power of critical thought if you do not yourself believe something and are not open to having these beliefs modified? What’s called critical thought generally takes place from no set position at all.”

David Ulin quoted a speech by Barack Obama to students at Hampton University in which he worried that for many of our young, information has become “a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment,20 rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.”

in his thought-provoking essay “Losing Our Way in the World,” the 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.”

the function of literature is communication between things that are different simply because they are different, not blunting but even sharpening the differences between them, following the true bent of written language.

I did not go further and test my comprehension for possible changes. I will admit that I did not want to know that. I simply wanted to regain what I had almost lost.

The Bureaus of Prisons in states across America know this well; many of them project the number of prison beds they will need in the future based on third- or fourth-grade reading statistics.

The brain organization that gives children with dyslexia14 significant advantages later in their lives—in areas such as art and architecture, pattern recognition in radiology and finance, and entrepreneurship—disadvantages them during their first years of learning.

there is little more destructive for a six-year-old child than to suddenly think that he or she is dumb because everyone else can read but him or her, whether the reason is biological or environmental or in some cases both.

Deep reading is always about connection: connecting what we know to what we read, what we read to what we feel, what we feel to what we think, and how we think to how we live out our lives in a connected world.

Then man would have denied and thrown away his own special nature—that he is a meditative being. Therefore, the issue is the saving of man’s essential nature—the keeping of the meditative thinking alive.”

“Digital media trains us to be high-bandwidth8 consumers rather than meditative thinkers. We download or stream a song, article, book or movie instantly, get through it (if we’re not waylaid by the infinite inventory also offered) and advance to the next immaterial thing.”

When asked what Buffett had taught him, Gates gently remarked that Buffett had taught him to “fill his calendar with spaces.”

“Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?11 Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”

Not unlike what Nelson Mandela related in Long Walk to Freedom, or Malcolm X in his autobiography, Stiegler read first for escape from his prison reality and then for what became an almost insatiable desire to learn.