Reader, Come Home Quotes

“In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the “Matthew Effect”41 after a passage in the New Testament. There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. Our young will not know what they do not know. Others, too. Without sufficient background”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“In childhood, he declared, the word-rich get richer and the word-poor get poorer, a phenomenon he called the “Matthew Effect”41 after a passage in the New Testament. There is also a Matthew-Emerson Effect for background knowledge: those who have read widely and well will have many resources to apply to what they read; those who do not will have less to bring, which, in turn, gives them less basis for inference, deduction, and analogical thought and makes them ripe for falling prey to unadjudicated information, whether fake news or complete fabrications. Our young will not know what they do not know. Others, too. Without sufficient background”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“Before two years of age, human interaction and physical interaction with books and print are the best entry into the world of oral and written language and internalized knowledge, the building blocks of the later reading circuit.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“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.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“There is a very simple, very beautiful Native American story I have always remembered. In this story a grandfather is telling his young grandson about life. He tells the little boy that in every person there are two wolves, who live in one's breast and who are always at war with each other. The first wolf is very aggressive and full of violence and hate toward the world. The second wolf is peaceful and full of light and love. The little boy anxiously asks his grandfather which wolf wins. The grandfather replies, "The one you feed.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“It is still a matter of amazement to me that what we know before we read any sentence prepares us to recognize even the visual shapes of the individual words faster and to understand their meanings more rapidly and more precisely in any new context.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“Do you, my reader, read with less attention and perhaps even less memory for what you have read? Do you notice when reading on a screen that you are increasingly reading for key words and skimming over the rest? Has this habit or style of screen reading bled over to your reading of hard copy? Do you find yourself reading the same passage over and over to understand its meaning? Do you suspect when you write that your ability to express the crux of your thoughts is subtly slipping or diminished? Have you become so inured to quick précis of information that you no longer feel the need or possess the time for your own analyses of this information? Do you find yourself gradually avoiding denser, more complex analyses, even those that are readily available? Very important, are you less able to find the same enveloping pleasure you once derived from your former reading self? Have you, in fact, begun to suspect that you no longer have the cerebral patience to plow through a long and demanding article or book? What if, one day, you pause and wonder if you yourself are truly changing and, worst of all, do not have the time to do a thing about it?”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“We have become so inundated with information that the average person in the United States now reads daily the same number of words as is found in many a novel. Unfortunately, this form of reading is rarely continuous, sustained, or concentrated; rather, the average 34 gigabytes consumed by most of us represent one spasmodic burst of activity after another.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“There are many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“In “Internet of Stings,” Jennifer Howard began one of the more disconcerting essays about some of these issues that came up in interviews with one of the purveyors of false news: As one master of the fake-news genre told the Washington Post55: “Honestly, people are definitely dumber. They just keep passing stuff around. Nobody fact-checks anything anymore.” Separating truth from fiction takes time, information literacy, and an open mind, all of which seem in short supply in a distracted, polarized culture. We love to share instantly—and that makes us easy to manipulate. There are many tough issues here for students, teachers, parents, and the members of our republic. How our citizens think, decide, and vote depends on their collective ability to navigate the complex realities of a digital milieu with intellects not just capable of, but accustomed to higher-level understanding and analysis. It is no longer only a matter of which medium is better for what; it is a question of how the optimal mode of thought in our children and our young adults and ourselves can be fostered in this moment of history. These are hardly new thoughts either for”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“The first is that students have become increasingly less patient with the time it takes to understand the syntactically demanding sentence structures in denser texts and increasingly averse to the effort needed to go deeper into their analysis. The second is that student writing is deteriorating. I have, to be sure, heard this criticism of undergraduates as long as I have been teaching. The question is nevertheless important for every age to confront. In our epoch, we must ask whether current students’ diminishing familiarity with conceptually demanding prose and the daily truncating of their writing on social media is affecting their writing in more negative ways than in the past.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“The central issue is not their intelligence, nor, more than likely, even their lack of familiarity with different styles of writing. Rather, it may come back to a lack of cognitive patience with demanding critical analytic thinking and a concomitant failure to acquire the cognitive persistence, what the psychologist Angela Duckworth famously called “grit,”54 nurtured by the very genres being avoided. Just as earlier I described how a lack of background knowledge and critical analytical skills can render any reader susceptible to unadjudicated or even false information, the insufficient formation and lack of use of these complex intellectual skills can render our young people less able to read and write well and therefore less prepared for their own futures.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“Put in more sobering terms, only one-third of twenty-first-century American children now read with sufficient understanding and speed at the exact age when their future learning depends on it. The fourth grade represents a Maginot Line between learning to read and learning to use reading to think and learn. More disturbing altogether, close to half”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“The psychologist Howard Gardner used the MIT scholar Seymour Papert’s famous description of the child’s “grasshopper mind”6 to describe the spasmodic way our digital young now typically “hop from point to point, distracted from the original task.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“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.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“…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.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“Wisdom, I conclude, is not contemplation alone, 28 not action alone, but contemplation in action.—John Dunne”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“That is what I want our young nascent readers to become: expert, flexible code switchers -- between print and digital mediums now and later between and among the multiple future communication mediums....I conceptualize the initial development of learning to think in each medium as largely separated into distinct domains in the first school years, until a point in time when the particular characteristics of the two mediums are each well developed and internalized.

That is an essential point. I want the child to have parallel levels of fluency, if you will, in each medium, just as if he or she were similarly fluent in speaking Spanish and English. In this way the uniqueness of the cognitive processes honed by each medium would be there from the start.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“But what if our capacity to perceive is actually decreasing because we are confronted with too much information, as the philosopher Josef Pieper once wrote?”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“the novelty bias that pulls our attention immediately toward anything new: “Humans will work just as hard to obtain8 a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate. . . . In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“An insight is a fleeting glimpse of the brain’s huge store58 of unknown knowledge. The cortex is sharing one of its secrets. —Jonah Lehrer”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention—a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits, but whose limits can be stretched.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“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.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“Indeed, “there are as many connections”27 in the reading brain’s circuitry “as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“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.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“I ask that you try on what Calvino described as a “rhythm of time that passes with no other aim12 than to let feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and shed all impatience or ephemeral contingency.” He used the Latin expression festina lente, which translates as “hurry slowly” or “hurry up slowly,” to underscore the writer’s need to slow time. I use it here to help you experience the third life more consciously: knowing how to quiet the eye and allow your thoughts to settle and be still, poised for what will follow.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“In the first quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom—with the resulting diminution of all three.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“Who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria37 of experiences, information, books we have read.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“Num meio que nos defronta continuamente com um excesso de informações, a grande tentação de muitos é se retirar para depósitos conhecidos de informações facilmente digeríveis, menos densas, intelectualmente menos exigentes. A ilusão de estarmos informados por um dilúvio diário de informações dimensionadas eletronicamente para o olho pode dificultar uma análise crítica de nossas realidades complexas.”
― Maryanne Wolf, O cérebro no mundo digital: os desafios da leitura na nossa era

“the powerful nature of what entering the lives of others can mean for our own lives. Drama makes more visible what each of us does when we pass over in our deepest, most immersive forms of reading. We welcome the Other as a guest within ourselves, and sometimes we become Other. For a moment in time we leave ourselves; and when we return, sometimes expanded and strengthened, we are changed both intellectually and emotionally.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World