After many years of research on how the human brain learns to read, I came to an unsettlingly simple conclusion: We humans were never born to read. — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
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 that environment's requirements - from different writing… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
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… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
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… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
Skimming has led, I believe, to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
We humans invented literacy, which means it doesn't come for free with our genes like speech and vision. Every brain has to learn it… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
The same plasticity that allows us to form a reading circuit to begin with, and short-circuit the development of deep reading if we allow… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
“There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain's astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
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… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
I am an apologist for the reading brain. It represents a miracle that springs from the brain's unique capacity to rearrange itself to learn… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader… — Maryanne Wolf Copy Share Image
