Maryanne Wolf

“For reasons we've explored, children struggling to read aren't going to be helped by the one-size-fits-all approach that is typical in so many schools. Rather, we need teachers who are train...”

“The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.”

“As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism...”

“Learning to read, for the brain, is a lot like an amateur ringmaster first learning how to organise a three-ring circus. He wants to begin individually and then synchronise all the performan...”

“We know from research that the reading circuit is not given to human beings through a genetic blueprint like vision or language; it needs an environment to develop. Further, it will adapt to...”

“The brain is constantly adapting.”

“We have to move into the 21st century, but we should do so with great care to build a 'bi-literate' brain that has the circuitry for 'deep reading' skills and, at the same time, is adept wit...”

“The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, mul...”

“My work on what is called 'deep reading' explores the range of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that underlie not only the emergence of creative thought when we read but also t...”

“There's an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies c...”

“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,...”

“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...”

“There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creatin...”

“I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience.”

“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 t...”

“The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a m...”

“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 o...”

“After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.”

“There's a richness that reading gives you, an opportunity to probe more than any other medium I know of. Reading is about not being content with the surface.”

“I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive...”