The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought.
Interpretation
Learning to read fundamentally transforms our brain and the way we think.
This quote by Maryanne Wolf highlights the profound impact that learning to read has on our cognitive abilities. It suggests that the process of acquiring reading skills goes beyond mere literacy; it physically alters the brain's structure and enhances our capacity for thought and understanding, thereby shaping our intellectual development and ways of interacting with the world.
In practice
This quote can be used in an educational speech to emphasize the importance of literacy.
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.
In reading, we are both scientists and poets.
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.
The quality of our reading is not only an index of the quality of our thought; it is our best-known route to developing whole new pathways in the cerebral evolution of our species.
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.
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.
The American high school graduate is two years behind his English, French or German counterpart; in Alabama, God knows how far behind.
I started teaching when I was in my 20s because Lee Strasberg asked me to, and he didn't do that with a lot of people.
I never heard of anyone who was really literate or who ever really loved books who wanted to suppress any of them.
The libraries of America are and must ever remain the home of free and inquiring minds. To them, our citizens-of all ages and races, of all creeds and persuasions-must be able to turn with clear confidence that there they can freely seek the whole truth, unvarnished by fashion and uncompromised by expediency.
I became a teacher all right. I wanted to become a teacher because I had a misconception about it. I didn't know that I'd be going into - when I first became a high school teacher in New York, that I'd be going into a battle zone, and no one prepared me for that.
Many people want to send their children to faith schools because they get good exam results, but they're not foolish enough to believe that it's because of faith that they get good exam results.
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