A biography for Maryanne Wolfhasn’t been written yet.
“As work in neurosciences indicates, the acquisition of literacy necessitated a new circuit in our species' brain more than 6,000 years ago. That circuit evolved from a very simple mechanism for decoding basic information, like the number of goats in one's herd, to the present, highly elaborated reading brain.”
“Inevitably, there will be many aspects of culture that would benefit from a more reflective or contemplative approach to them.”
“As a cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading, I am particularly concerned with the plight of the reading brain as it encounters this technologically rich society.”
“My work on what is called 'deep reading' explores the range of linguistic, cognitive, and affective processes that underlie not only the emergence of creative thought when we read but also the development and strengthening of capacities like empathy and critical analysis that we can apply to the rest of our lives.”
“Typically, when you read, you have more time to think. Reading gives you a unique pause button for comprehension and insight. By and large, with oral language - when you watch a film or listen to a tape - you don't press pause.”
“No one can ever prepare a parent for two things: the immeasurable love that comes with having a child; and the sorrow and confusion that comes when your child appears to learn in a different way from other children.”
“Every opportunity to practice is a gift to the developing reader. Practice, practice, practice, in every form and medium!”
“There's no question that our children's attention and memory is changing when they are reading too long, too much, too early on digital screens.”
“The first and most common reason for not being a fluent reader is that the child does not yet know how to decode very well yet. They lack automatic decoding skills, and this prevents them from being able to read accurately, much less smoothly and quickly. Decoding accuracy is the first prerequisite to fluency.”
“Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.”
“Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new 'reading circuit' afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity.”
“We are not only what we read. We are how we read.”
“After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.”
“The questions that our society must ask revolve around whether the time-consuming demands of the deep-reading processes will be lost in a culture whose principal mediums advantage speed, multitasking, and processing the next and the next piece of information.”
“It's an individual waste and it's an economic waste for Australia not to recognise dyslexia.”
“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.”
“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.”
“Skimming has led, I believe, to a tendency to go to the sources that seem the simplest, most reduced, most familiar, and least cognitively challenging. I think that leads people to accept truly false news without examining it, without being analytical.”
“There are no genes or areas in the brain devoted uniquely to reading. Rather, our ability to read represents our brain's protean capacity to learn something outside our repertoire by creating new circuits that connect existing circuits in a different way.”
“The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it.”