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

by Maryanne Wolf

The best-known design principle, neuroplasticity,8 underlies just about everything interesting about reading—from forming a new circuit by connecting older parts, to recycling existing neurons, to adding new and elaborated branches to the circuit over time. Most important for this discussion, however, plasticity also underlies why the reading-brain circuit is inherently malleable (read changeable) and influenced by key environmental factors: specifically, what it reads (both the particular writing system and the content), how it reads (the particular medium, such as print or screen, and its effects on the way we read), and how it is formed (methods of instruction). The crux of the matter is that the plasticity of our brain permits us to form both ever more sophisticated and expanded circuits and also ever less sophisticated circuits, depending on environmental factors.