76 Quotes by Maryanne Wolf

We are not only what we read. We are how we read.

We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a 'fresh' brain - one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read.

Look around on your next plane trip. The iPad is the new pacifier for babies and toddlers. Younger school-aged children read stories on smartphones; older boys don't read at all, but hunch over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds.

Digital technology can be a great resource, but it can also be a pernicious one, so it's how we, as a society, really study the cognitive impact of that and use evidence-based research to go after the technology designers to do a better job of dealing with the problems of memory and attention we are seeing.

Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips.

Reading or written language is a cultural invention that necessitated totally new connections among structures in the human brain underlying language, perception, cognition, and, over time, our emotions.

The attention span of children may be one of the main reasons why an immersion in on-screen reading is so engaging, and it may also be why digital reading may ultimately prove antithetical to the long-in-development, reflective nature of the expert reading brain as we know it.

Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge.

No one can ever prepare a parent for two things: the immeasurable love that comes with having a child; and the sorrow and confusion that comes when your child appears to learn in a different way from other children.