Maryanne Wolf

“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 over video games. Parents and other passengers read on Kindles or skim a flotilla of email and news feeds.”

“We are the worst of fools if we do not teach every child to become truly expert, deep readers.”

“The brain is plastic its whole life span.”

“I have always worried about who can read, who can't, who doesn't, and the great, life-altering consequences hidden within those distinctions.”

“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.”

“Reading is a bridge to thought.”

“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.”

“We would be the worst of fools if we would ever lose this extraordinary capacity to go beyond the limits of past thought and past prejudices.”

“What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think.”

“There are, no doubt, as many conceptualizations of the good life as there are lives that aspire to it, but surely one of the most important pathways to its achievement begins with the desire to seek what is good - for the self, for those we love, for 'our neighbor,' for our earth.”

“Skimming is fine for our emails, but it's not fine for some of the important forms of reading.”

“Fluency is the developmental process that connects decoding with everything we know about words to make the meaning of the text come to life. Fluency is a wonderful bridge to comprehension and to a life-long love of reading.”

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

“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 performances. It only happens after all the separate acts are learned and practised long and well.”

“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.”

“I am an educator and neuroscientist who studies how the brain learns to read and what happens when a young brain can't learn to read easily, as in the childhood learning challenge, developmental dyslexia.”

“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 something new.”

“The most basic definition of fluency is simply the ability to read text accurately and quickly.”

“I want my thoughts to be an incentive for the reader to give his or her own thoughts. After I wrote 'Proust and the Squid,' I received truly hundreds of letters - I'm still receiving them - and the letters that I wrote back helped me formulate my thinking around things I know are important to others.”