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.
Interpretation
Reading and writing have fundamentally changed how our brains work and how we think and feel.
This quote by Maryanne Wolf emphasizes that reading and written language are not just tools for communication, but profound cultural inventions that have reshaped the human brain. They have forged new connections between language, perception, cognition, and emotions, influencing how we process and understand the world around us.
In practice
In a discussion about the importance of literacy in education, this quote can highlight how reading shapes our brains.
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.
I come to writing the same way I come to teaching, which is that my goal is always to create life-long readers.
My poetry is me trying to reconcile my own life and opportunities I've had with opportunities my students aren't given and how profoundly unfair that is.
As an educator, I try to get people to be fundamentally curious and to question ideas that they might have or that are shared by others. In that state of mind, they have earned a kind of inoculation against the fuzzy thinking of these weird ideas floating around out there.
School is a twelve-year jail sentence where bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned.
We should be teaching young girls to take up space. Nothing is as important as taking up space in society and cementing yourself.
If someone has children, the first thing they want is for them to be happy, and then become someone in life and all that. But the educational system, I mean always, not just now, creates competitive, successful people, and does not educate them to be happy. The problem is that success gives money, not happiness. The eternal problem.
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