Best quotes by Maryanne Wolf on Brain

Checkout quotes by Maryanne Wolf on Brain

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ After we become literate, we literally 'think differently' about language: images of brain activation between literate and nonliterate humans bear this out.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ The brain is plastic its whole life span.

  - Maryanne Wolf
  

• ‟ The brain is constantly adapting.

  - 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
  

• ‟ Reading requires the brain to rearrange its original parts to learn something new.

  - 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
  

• ‟ 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
  

• ‟ 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