Maryanne Wolf Quotes

All of imagination - everything that we think, we feel, we sense - comes through the human brain. And once we create new patterns in this brain, once we shape the brain in a new way, it never returns to its original shape.

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.

Your brain develops depending on your individual history. What has gone on in your own brain and its consciousness over your lifetime is not repeatable, ever - not with identical twins, not even with conjoined twins.

Many cognitive psychologists see the brain as a computer. But every single brain is absolutely individual, both in its development and in the way it encounters the world.

Mediums change you by their very existence. They do this on fundamental levels because they force you to favour certain parts of your brain over others.

The brain is one of the richest green fields of science. There's so much yet to be discovered.

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.

When we learn to read, it's a real product of civilization and a civilized society. It affects your brain. It affects the way you think, and it gives you that capacity for self-reflection that you simply do not have without the agency of books.

What we find is that our brains have colossal things happening in them all the time.

It is literally the case that learning languages makes you smarter. The neural networks in the brain strengthen as a result of language learning.

The elementary school must assume as its sublime and most solemn responsibility the task of teaching every child in it to read. Any school that does not accomplish this has failed.

The theory of isolation of certain tasks in certain hemispheres of the brain suggests I shouldn't even be able to speak, never mind write.

We don't really even know how the Internet and technology are changing us, or our brains and our attention span.

We learn differently as children than as adults. For grown-ups, learning a new skill is painful, attention-demanding, and slow. Children learn unconsciously and effortlessly.

You teach a child to read, and he or her will be able to pass a literacy test.

The mind of the polyglot is a very particular thing, and scientists are only beginning to look closely at how acquiring a second language influences learning, behavior and the very structure of the brain itself.

I think neuroscience is obviously very esoteric, but I think there are aspects of it that can absolutely be brought down to the level of an interested 11-, 12-, 13-year-old easily.

Each brain is exposed to different circumstances. It's very likely that your brain is unique in the history of the universe.

I think we're all fascinated and a little mystified by how the brain works. One of the most mysterious of the physical sciences is neurological science.

I know what not being able to read can do to a child's confidence.

We are cyborgs already. If you learn to read, it causes permanent changes to the structure of your brain for your entire life.

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.

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.

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.

The connections in the brain fade away unless used. We know that early stimulation of children leads to higher cognitive scores.