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

by Maryanne Wolf

the act of reading is a special place in which human beings are freed from themselves to pass over to others and, in so doing, learn what it means to be another person with aspirations, doubts, and emotions that they might otherwise never have known.

For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally.

The careful formation of critical reasoning is the best way to inoculate the next generation against manipulative and superficial information, whether in text or on screen.

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.

“Like pleated fabric, the text reveals different parts . . . at different times. And yet every time the text unfolds, . . . the reader adds new wrinkles. Memory and experience press themselves into each reading so that each encounter informs the next.”

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction. . . . It returns us to a reckoning with time.

The worst atrocities of the twentieth century bear tragic witness to what occurs when a society fails to examine its own actions and cedes its analytical powers to those who tell them how to think and what to fear.