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.
Libraries have had a long history of dealing with authoritarian organizations demanding reader records - who's read what - and this has led to people being rounded up and killed.
I know a good many men of great learning-that is, men born with an extraordinary eagerness and capacity to acquire knowledge. One and all, they tell me that they can't recall learning anything of any value in school. All that schoolmasters managed to accomplish with them was to test and determine the amount of knowledge that they had already acquired independently-and not infrequently the determination was made clumsily and inaccurately.
I probably spend 90% of my time revising what I've written.
I see it as my job to try to make history to be a popular thing. The longer I keep going the less weird it will be to be a female historian.
The biggest thing I noticed growing up when I was doing BMX racing or playing rugby through to secondary school level, was seeing the parents who were so desperate to see their kids do well that they were almost living their lives through their kids and putting huge pressure on them to the point they weren't enjoying it.
The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that education must start from birth.
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