Welcome to the world of Maryanne Wolf, a realm where the power of words and the intricacies of language take center stage. Maryanne Wolf, a distinguished scholar and author, has dedicated her career to unraveling the mysteries of reading, comprehension, and the human brain’s remarkable capacity for language acquisition. Through her groundbreaking research and profound insights, Wolf has illuminated the pathways of literacy, offering profound perspectives on how we perceive, interpret, and interact with written text.
As a pioneer in the field of cognitive neuroscience of reading, Maryanne Wolf has delved deep into the complexities of the human mind, exploring the intricate connections between language, cognition, and culture. Her work has not only enriched our understanding of reading processes but has also shed light on the profound impact of digital technology on the way we engage with written information. Through her books, lectures, and academic endeavors, Wolf has sparked conversations, provoked thoughts, and inspired countless individuals to ponder the fundamental role of reading in shaping our identities and societies.
Below, you will find a curated collection of Maryanne Wolf’s insightful quotes, offering glimpses into her profound wisdom and thought-provoking perspectives on the art and science of reading. These quotes are not merely words on a page; they are windows into the mind of a visionary thinker, inviting you to explore the boundless possibilities of language and literacy.
After we become literate, we literally ‘think differently’ about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
We human beings were never born to read; we invented reading and then had to teach it to every new generation. Each new reader comes to reading with a ‘fresh’ brain – one that is programmed to speak, see, and think, but not to read. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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 systems to the characteristics of whatever medium is used. Maryanne Wolf
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 it, also allows us to learn how to duplicate deep reading in a new environment. We cannot go backwards. As children move more toward an immersion in digital media, we have to figure out ways to read deeply there. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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
Reading is a bridge to thought. Maryanne Wolf
The most basic definition of fluency is simply the ability to read text accurately and quickly. Maryanne Wolf
When we have any function, whether it’s language or vision or cognitive functions like memory, we aren’t dealing with a straight line to the brain that says ‘This is what I do.’ The brain builds a network of connections, a network of neurons that have a particular role in that function. Maryanne Wolf
What we read, how we read, and why we read change how we think. Maryanne Wolf
Literacy is so much entwined in our lives that we often fail to realize that the act of reading is a miracle that is evolving under our fingertips. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
I work in a mix of areas and am informed by them all: child development, psycholinguistics, education, and most especially, cognitive neuroscience. Maryanne Wolf
Every opportunity to practice is a gift to the developing reader. Practice, practice, practice, in every form and medium! Maryanne Wolf
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 afresh. Maryanne Wolf
Skimming is fine for our emails, but it’s not fine for some of the important forms of reading. Maryanne Wolf
I have always worried about who can read, who can’t, who doesn’t, and the great, life-altering consequences hidden within those distinctions. Maryanne Wolf
We are the worst of fools if we do not teach every child to become truly expert, deep readers. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
Inevitably, there will be many aspects of culture that would benefit from a more reflective or contemplative approach to them. Maryanne Wolf
I worry that the superficial way we read during the day is affecting us when we have to read with more in-depth processing. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
The integration of the simpler and the deeper reading processes is not automatic and requires years of learning by the novice reader, as well as extra milliseconds for any expert to read a more sophisticated text. Maryanne Wolf
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. 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. Maryanne Wolf
Focused reading is so important, and I’m just as guilty as everyone. I have to force myself to slow down, often printing things out or using print as a medium for things that are most important or for things whose beauty would be lost if I use other modes of reading. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
Deep reading refers to a whole continuum of processes that include some of the most important things about thinking and how we connect thought to what we read – critical analysis, analogical reasoning, how we infer from the text, how do we take another’s perspective. Maryanne Wolf
I want children to learn to develop deep reading skills in the beginning in print. I believe the physicality of print is much better in the beginning for children, and then help them learn how to use their deep reading skills on digital medium. Maryanne Wolf
It’s an individual waste and it’s an economic waste for Australia not to recognise dyslexia. Maryanne Wolf
If you word-spot James Joyce, you’ll miss the entire experience. Maryanne Wolf
The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
The brain is plastic its whole life span. Maryanne Wolf
Children need to have both time to think and the motivation to think for themselves, to develop an expert reading brain, before the digital mode dominates their reading. The immediacy and volume of information should not be confused with true knowledge. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
We are not only what we read. We are how we read. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
We need to discern what it is that requires reflection in our lives and in what we read and how we read it. Maryanne Wolf
I don’t want technology to replace teachers, but where there are no teachers, or the teachers are overwhelmed, it can be helpful. Maryanne Wolf
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 circuitry for ‘deep reading’ skills and, at the same time, is adept with technology. Maryanne Wolf
I have no doubt that the digital immersion of our children will provide a rich life of entertainment and information and knowledge. My concern is that they will not learn, with their passive immersion, the joy and the effort of the third life, of thinking one’s own thoughts and going beyond what is given. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
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. Maryanne Wolf
There’s an old rule in neuroscience that does not alter with age: use it or lose it. It is a very hopeful principle when applied to critical thought in the reading brain because it implies choice. Maryanne Wolf
The brain is constantly adapting. Maryanne Wolf
In reading, we are both scientists and poets. Maryanne Wolf
Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new. Maryanne Wolf