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.
Teach and practice, practice and teach - that is all we have; that is all we are good for; that is all we ever ought to do.
Reading is exercise for our brains in the guise of pleasure. Books give us insight into other people, other cultures. They make us laugh. They make us think. If they are really good, they make us believe that we are better for having read them.
I consider the world, this Earth, to be like a school, and our life the classrooms.
Books can not be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can abolish memory... In this war, we know, books are weapons. And it is a part of your dedication always to make them weapons for man's freedom.
My mother said I must always be intolerant of ignorance but understanding of illiteracy.
Intense study of the Bible will keep any writer from being vulgar, in point of style.
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