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

by Maryanne Wolf

stories and fairy tales that will reappear over and over in their later school years. These are the stories that prepare them for their culture and teach them lifelong lessons: what it means to be a hero, a villain, or a redoubtable princess; what it means to be kind to others; how it feels when someone is unfair and unjust. The universal moral laws every culture possesses begin with stories. Indeed, we humans are a species of storytellers. In his fascinating book The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human, Jonathan Gottschall hypothesizes from a literary perspective that stories help our children and indeed all of us “practice reacting to the kinds of challenges20 that are, and always were, most crucial to our success as a species.” Such a thought is an expansion of something21 that the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker also speculated upon with his argument that stories, not unlike remembered bridge or chess moves, help us face similar difficulties in life armed with possible strategies for solving them.