Transcript: Maryanne Wolf We were never born to read. There’s nothing, absolutely nothing in the brain that says, put me in an environment, I will learn to read. That’s what we have with vision and language and all these beautiful capacities we have. They just have a genetic program and they unfold. Not so with reading. David Sparks Yeah, there’s no built-in software to read a book. Maryanne Wolf No software, no software. What it does have, though, and that’s a magnificent, even I sometimes use the word miraculous, and I mean it. It is a miraculous design principle that our brain can take its older parts that are genetically programmed and make new connections to make the basis for a new invention, whether it’s Literacy or numeracy or all the capacities that the digital culture is inviting us to learn. So we really have this design principle that says, when faced with this new invention, you can adapt this set of circuits in a new way. (Time 0:10:42)
Transcript: Maryanne Wolf This is what people don’t even think about, that it took us thousands of years to figure out the alphabetic principle. And we give the kids just a couple thousand days to get a cognitive principle that words are composed of little bits of sound, linguistically phonemes, and that those sounds are represented By a visual letter, a symbol. Now, all this really takes a lot of cognitive skill that the child is learning. (Time 0:13:39)
Transcript: Maryanne Wolf The brain has to connect the visual system to not only the phoneme system, phonological system, but the semantic system, what words mean, the syntactic system, how we use words in different Ways in sentences and stories and text. There are many more things that we connected to, but I’ll stop here by saying also the affective system. Once you learn what words mean, they begin to inspire feelings. They activate whole parts of the brain that are, I’ll just say, some of your listeners will know what the amygdala or the thalamus or itchipocraps are. Well, I’ll just say underneath the second layer, if you will, is all of this stuff about how memory and affect are coming together. Well, that first circuit, if you can imagine, is beautifully connected when that child learns how to read fast enough, what’s called fluently enough or proficiently enough to get Meaning. (Time 0:15:14)
Transcript: Maryanne Wolf Yes, I actually use a term that a mentor of mine, a theologian, John Dunn, used, which is called passing over. Now, the more sophisticated term in cognitive neuroscience would be the perspective taking capacity. But I really love the idea, and some of the neuroscientists are really exploring this, how what we read actually changes us because we take on not just the feelings, but the thoughts And the feelings of others. So whether it’s fiction or nonfiction, we are leaving our limited perception of the world, our limited knowledge of the world, and we’re passing over into another perspective on the World. And so we are, in the terms of neuroscience, we are activating two kinds of empathy processes, affective empathy processes. One’s more cognitive, so that’s the more Machiavellian passing perspective taking, learning the thoughts of others. But there is this affective kind of empathy where we experience for sometimes the first time what it feels like to be this other person, this other character, or this other whole population. And there’s something that, you know, Diaz said that reading is the closest we ever get to telepathy. And that’s what it really is doing. It is giving us a telepathic transport, if you will, into the thoughts and feelings and perspective of others. And then going back to the passing over, we pass over, we experience, and we return. And when we return, we are changed. We are enriched. Sometimes we are enraged, but we are different. And we are different because we’ve added a cumulative, we’ve added to the cumulative repertoire of knowledge of others in this amazing transformation of who we are to adding knowledge (Time 0:18:39)
Transcript: Maryanne Wolf There is interesting neuroscience on what happens when we read a passage that is not only emotionally challenging, but can be physically challenging. And what I mean by that, and I told you I’m actually writing stories for this RAVO intervention for children who are struggling, in which I actually use some of the neuroscience. Of course, it’s a story for first and second graders, but it’s about the fact that when we read, the little girl who’s in a wheelchair says, when I read, I have wings from my mind. And when I read about someone jumping or running, I’m running too. The truth is that that is part of the neuroscience research that, and I use the, I guess, Mike has read it more recently, but the example of Anna Karenina leaping, you know, with her red Bag at the train station, leaping in front of the train. Well, we leap. Our motoric system is leaping. Well, analogically, we are in our affective system. We are despairing when she does that. So we are just, we’re leaping with our motoric system, but we are also leaping with the despair that she felt. (Time 0:31:06)
Transcript: Maryanne Wolf My colleague, Naomi Barron, always says that the screen hastens us along. And I say, and print allows us to pause, allows us. And here’s where the cognitive neuroscience comes in, allows the eye to both go ahead, like just a few letters ahead, but also where it had not necessarily confirmed what went before, Easily able, it’s right there to go back and check. This process is called comprehension monitoring. And the digital screen disadvantages reader for monitoring. It advantages it for skimming and getting a lot of information fast, but it disadvantages especially the child because the child has to learn these deeper, more time-consuming processes, How to get them connected. I give you a 101 on the reading brain circuit, but that 101 didn’t say enough about how those connections take time to develop, takes years to develop learning how to connect to our best Thought and our best feeling. So the printed work, the book, the physical book, not only for the child, but also for the adult, gives us more opportunity to monitor how we’re thinking and to give us not a, and in psychology, There’s a term called set. That’s a tendency. And the screen is the set towards finishing it. (Time 0:40:53)
Transcript: Maryanne Wolf I don’t want those bad habits to be learned from the start by our children. And so I have the concept in the book in three of those chapter letters about how we might develop a biliterate brain in which on the one hand they’re learning how to read and get deep reading For about 10 years with print and then at the same time they’re learning how to use digital and all the amazing programming and coding skills that they need. So there’s parallel development. And then at a certain time, when the teacher feels that they are ready, they are going to be learning how to do deep reading on any medium, but with teachers prepared to understand the Advantages and disadvantages of different mediums for individual children. (Time 0:42:45)
Transcript: Maryanne Wolf But there’s a lot of research now on attention, which is, again, the focus of your focus on focus. And the attention of our children has to be learned in a way that is developmentally appropriate. And what I, not that I sense, what I now know from all too much of the research that’s going on, is that the kids are having their attention, especially when they’re really young, constantly Distracted, constantly moving to the next. And you said this consuming, they are consuming and not creating. That brain is consuming and absorbing information, but it’s not being as active in the same way as when they are either listening to the story, if they’re zero to five, or reading the Story themselves in a printed book. (Time 0:46:53)