Transcripts For CSPAN2 Maryanne Wolf Reader Come Home 20240713

Good evening. I am claire and thank you for joining us with Maryanne Wolf is here to discuss her book reader, come home the reading brain in a Digital World. Before we dive and i would like to take a moment to let you know about Upcoming Eventss. Our summer in cambridge means one thing, fiction friday. For the rest of august, instore, new fiction purchases, 15 off every friday for members of our frequent buyer program. Next monday we welcome jack davis and his new book on golf the making of an american see. On wednesday the fifteenth roy scranton will be in conversation about the new book we are doomed, now but, essays on war and climate change, both of these beginning 7 00 pm and are right here at the store. Our fall event season is about to kick off, we are thrilled to welcome authors like john kerry, Walter Mosley and many many others. You can learn more about these and all our Upcoming Events on our website, harvard. Com events on these yellow flyers. After the talk there will be time for questions, we are pleased to have cspan booktv here taping todays event. When you ask a question, stand up and speak loudly so they can pick it up. Please note that you will be recorded. Following q and a we will have a book signing at the table. Reader, come home the reading brain in a Digital World is available in registers at the next room in todays 20 off. Part of how we say thank you for buying books at Harvard Bookstore and supporting this event series, your purchases make this event possible so thank you. I would like to thank you in advance and remind you to turn off, at minimum silence your cell phones for the duration, someones phone will go off and you will feel so superior. Is your neighbors and not yours. If you turn those off, that will be great. We are joined by Maryanne Wolf, visiting professor at ucla where she had to present for dyslexia, Diverse Learners and social justice. Will is no stranger, shes from the john dimaggio, director of the center for reading and language development. She has been honored with multiple research and teaching honors including the fulbright fellowship, and the American Teaching award and she cofounded curious learning, a Global Literacy initiative. You may also be familiar with her last book, tales of illiteracy for the Twentieth Century. Since the donald time or at least the 1960s pundits have been telling us tv rot our brains and that in the digital era, screen time, have entered our lexicon. When it comes to reading is there such a thing is too Much Technology and what are the consequences, how does reading on a screen versus page affect our reasoning abilities or Attention Spans . In her new book reader, come home the reading brain in a Digital World will answers these questions and more in a series of letters, we she looks at how our brains are changing in response to the digital age. A must read for anyone who spends their day on a computer and for anyone raising a child in this crazy world of ours. Ramp hollow and is one of the most dissipated books and he was called it lively, ambitious and deeply informative. We are pleased to have marianne with us tonight so please join me in welcoming her to Harvard Bookstore. [applause] thank you so much was i cannot believe i see so many friends in 5 minutes and havent seen you for so long. I would love it if you could sit on the floor, those of you who are there, the head of the Dyslexia Foundation who is so creative. Please follow wills example, please. Actually, just back here, as some of you know, from france and the last thing i did was swim in one of those very cold swiss alps rivers and i lost my voice for my First Reading so, where is deborah, debra occasionally will read a quote from the beginning with the first one but when i see your faces it is not as a neuroscientist but more like emily dickinson. Dont know if you knew her, one beautiful poem, the soul selects her own society as it closes the doors so thats what we are going to do tonight, you are my very special society. I have a fantasy, claire wont allow me to do it. That someday im going to come and do a reading with you, my select society and say books on the house i dont know why but this has been my great fantasy. To cspan i want to tell you that you did Something Wonderful for me and for people who have hangovers on new years eve because they kept putting mine on new years day and all these people who never would have read a thing by me, i remember you. So thank you for doing this tonight. I will begin by saying i will speak about deborahs domain, debra is a former ceo of better communication but what i love about her as she is my favorite soprano in the backseat corral and shes going to help me read some of this. This is a book of letters and it is a book of letters because i do not have the last word. I have words and i look at so many people i have worked with, a linguist linguist, all of you who are here love words. A letter gives opening to two sets of words. It is since a letter is strictly blessed because what it does is it gives me a chance to accuse you the best of my thinking and hope it elicits the best of yours. In the first letter i wont read to you. I will read only the last piece of the last letter. I quote Thomas Aquinas and he said iron sharpens iron and that is almost the dilemma that we are in in the Digital World. We all are progressing in extraordinary ways. Its never going to be a binary, this discussion and the letters enable me to in fact, by the very structure of the book say we are entering the dilemma of this age together and your thoughts will sharpen mine and i hope my thoughts will sharpen yours. I am so excited, thank you so much for bringing them so debra, i would like you to begin with the quote that is the beginning of my last letter 9 and i will proceed so if you would kindly . I, everybody. To read, we need a certain kind of silence that seems increasingly elusive in our over networked society. It is not contemplation we desire but im on sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know. In such a landscape knowledge cant help but fall prey to illusion, albeit an illusion that is deeply seductive with its promise that speed can lead us to illumination, that it is more important to react then to think deeply. Reading is an act of contemplation. An act of resistance in a landscape of distraction. It returns us to a reckoning with time. Now i am going to begin a letter. I need you to realize the books title, this is the second time my book title got changed. This title should have been letters to the good reader and you will see why and all my colleagues know how much work i do with dyslexia. There are a lot of different meanings to a good reader but you will see that i was trying in some ways to give gratitude not to the lyrical beauty of letters to the young poet, but to give homage to a man who, through letters, tried to give his best to someone he would never know, he would never meet. My letters are in essence the hope a dialogue can be had with people i will never meet. My dear reader, when i was very young i thought good reader meant one could read all the books that filled two tiny shelves in a two room schoolhouse. When i began to study in places where books were so many they felt multiple Library Buildings with levels deep underground, and when i was a young teacher in a place whose teachers and long left my only thought was if i could not help those children become good readers they would never leave the borders of their familys indentured lives. When i first became a researcher, i chased when studies would become good figures with children and individuals with dyslexia who were targeting almost anyone else to understand and read the text. Finally, when i studied what the brain does when it retrieves the meanings of words, every meaning i possessed for good reader would be activated. I have added a new meaning as discussed in my introduction. Aristotle wrote a good society has three lives, the life of knowledge and productivity, the life of entertainment within the greek understanding of leisure and finally the life of contemplation. So too, i believe, either three lives of the good reader. There is the first life of the good reader in gathering information and acquiring knowledge and we are all awash in their life. There is a second life in which reading various forms of entertainment are to be found in abundance, but she distraction and exquisite pleasure of emotion in stories of other lives, and articles about mysterious, newly discovered excel planets, in poems that steal our breath away. We need to take this most Economic Trends force away from our frantically pursued every day life. The third is the culmination of reading and the terminus of the other two lives, the reflective life in which whatever genre we are reading we enter a totally invisible personal realm, our private Holding Crown where we can contemplate all manner of human existence and ponder the universe whose real mysteries towards any of our imaginations. Theologian john done wrote that our culture fully embodies aristotles first two lives of the good society but receives each day from the third contemplative life. So too, i think, the third life of the good reader. There is no shortage of contemporary observance a Digital Culture who worry not unlike Martin Heidegger that the meditative dimension is threatened by an overwhelming emphasis on materialism, consumerism and a fractured relationship with time. As Steve Wasserman asked, does the ethos of acceleration demand our capacity for deliberation and then feeble our capacity for genuine reflection, does the daily avalanche of information banished the space needed for actual wisdom . Readers know in their bones something we forget at our peril, that without books, without literacy the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs. If we are to evaluate the truth in such descriptions of a Digital Culture we must examine ourselves. Without a cognitive full image, and look at who we are now both as readers and as habitants of a shared planet. Many changes in our thinking now as much to our biological reflex to novel stimulus to survive as a culture, to a survive, i lost that track even though i wrote it. We have a novelty bias and as an species we had to look at all of these to survive whether it is a predator or prey and i am suggesting the changes in our thinking today was much to that biological reflex to attempt novel stimuli as to a culture that floods us with continuous stimuli with our collusion. It will be what we do next, with our growing consciousness of the changes that matters whether we exacerbate the negative changes by ignoring them or underestimate the increased knowledge. This will depend in part on what all of us into next. Whether we are able to attend to our capacity for reflection in this epic is a matter of personal choice, with critical implications not only for us as individuals but for us as citizens. John done saw the loss of this is related to the rise of violence and conflict in society. I see it more as an outcome of the constant need for efficiency, buying time without knowing for what purpose, decreasing Attention Spans pushed beyond their cognitive limits by a smoke song of distractions and information that will never become knowledge and the increasingly manipulated and superficial uses of knowledge that will never become wisdom. In the first half of the Twentieth Century t. S. Eliot wrote where is the wisdom weve lost in knowledge . Where is the knowledge weve lost in information . In the First Quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge and knowledge with wisdom, with the resulting diminution of all three. Exemplified by the interactive dynamics that governs our deep reading processes. Only the location of time to our inferential and critical analytical functions can transform information into knowledge that can then be consolidated into memory. Only this internalized knowledge in turn will draw us, enable us to make analogy and inferences with the new information. The discernment of truth and the value of new information depend on our allocation of time to critical analytic processes. During these last moments together, we are not done. I have two more minutes, sorry. I ask that you try on what a great writer described as a rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to the feelings and thoughts settle down, mature, and should all impatience or ephemeral contingency. He used the latin expression which translates as hurried up. He wanted to wonderscore the writers need to slow down time for us. I use it here to help you experience the third life more consciously, knowing how to quiet the eye and allow your thoughts to settle and be still so as to be poised for what will follow. I want children to learn the capacity of cognitive patience. And i ask you all now to reclaim what we all may have lost. Christina lanza gives a reduced way of the way most of us now see, fastest chance, only if you must. To process cognitive patience is to recover a rhythm of time that allows you to attend with consciousness and intention. You read quickly until you are conscious of the thought to comprehend, the beauty to appreciate, the questions to remember and the insight to unfold. Few historical individuals better illuminate the life altering importance of the joy of reading even in the direst of circumstances than dietrich von hoffer, described in some of my other work he wrote one of the most moving books i ever read, letters and papers from prison, after being thrown into a concentration camp for his views on nazi germany, the letters fortran embattled, unyielding spirit kept alive in very large part by what he could read to himself, the one luxury his illustrious family was able to give him, to his fellow prisoners and as revealing as anything, to his prison guards. My hope for my children and my childrens children and yours is that they will now where to find the many forms of joy that reside in the secret hiding places in the reading life and the sanctuary gives all of us who seek it. In a recent essay about the values of our nation Marilyn Robinson wrote, quote, i believe that we stand at a threshold as von hoffer did and the example of his life obliges me to speak about the gravity of our historical moment as i see it and the knowledge that no society at any time is immune to moral catastrophe. We owe it to him to acknowledge a bitter lesson he learned before us that these challenges can be understood too late. We live in a historical moment en route to all new forms of communication, whole new forms of cognition and choices that are ultimately i suggest to you deeply ethical. Unlike during other great transitions we have the science, the technology and the ethical imagination necessary to understand the challenges we face before it is too late if we choose to do so. We need to confront the reality and when bombarded with too many options our default can be to rely on information that places too few demands upon our thinking. More and more of us think we know something based on information whose source was chosen to conform to how and when we thought before. Thus though we are seemingly well armed with information there is less and less motivation to think more deeply, much less try on views that differ from our own. We think we know enough. That misleading mental state that lulls us into a form of passive cognitive complacency, that precludes further reflection and opens wide the door for others to see for us. This is a long known recipe for social and moral neglect in the frame of suicidal order. At stake is the ultimate message of this book that any version of the digital chain hypothesis which you will have to read the book to understand, i am so sorry, poses a threat to the use of our most reflective capacity if we remain unaware of its potential with all its profound implications for the future of a Democratic Society. The accuracy and gradual disuse of our analytical and reflective capacity as individuals are the worst enemies of a truly Democratic Society. For whatever reason in whatever medium in whatever age. The worst atrocities of the Twentieth Century bear witness tragically to workers when Society Fails to examine its own actions and sees analytical powers to those who tell them how to think and what to fear. Dietrich von hoffer described this old scenario from his prison cell. He wrote if we look more closely, we see that any violent display of power, whether political or religious, produces an outburst of folly in a large part of mankind. This seems actually to be a psychological and sociological law. The power of some leads to the folly of others. It is not certain intellectual capacities become stunted or destroyed but rather that the upsurge of power make such an overwhelming impression that men are deprived of their independent judgment and give up trying to assess the new state of affairs for themselves. Two of the greatest mistakes of the 21st century therefore would be to ignore those of the Twentieth Century and failed to evaluate whether we have already begun to cede our critical and analytical powers and independent judgment to those, to others in our society, to others in our increasingly fisher did society. Cracks, for those young people. Few people expressed would contest that such diminishment of our collective critical faculties has already begun. What would be contested is in whom and why. I could never have imagined researching changes in the reading brain and i have wonderful colleagues who did Similar Research most of which reflect increasing adaptation to a Digital Culture would have implications for a Democratic Society yet that is my conclusion. The most important contribution of written language to the species is a Democratic Foundation for critical inferential reasoning and reflective capacity. This is the basis of our collective conscience. If we in the 21st century are to preserve a vital collective conscience, we must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both deeply and well. I cant help but say that at least 25 of you in this room are working for literacy in some way with some population either here, in africa, india, our own backyard. We will fail as a society we do not educate our children and reeducate all of our citizenry to the responsibility of each citizen to process information vigilantly, critically and wisely across all media and we will fail as a society as surely as societies of the Twentieth Century if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us. A democracy succeeds only when the rights, thoughts and aspirations of all its citizens are respected and given voice and citizens believe this is true regardless of viewpoint. The great insufficiently discussed danger to a society stems not from the expression of different views but from the failure to ensure that all citizens are educated to use their fool intellectual powers in forming those views. The vacuum that occurs when this is not realized leads ineluctably to a vulnerability to demagoguery. When falsely raised hopes and falsely raised fears trump reason in the capacity for reflective thinking precedes along with its influence on rational, empathic decisionmaking. Most people will never become aware of any of this, just as i worry that in their overreliance on external forces of information our young will not know what they do not know, i worry equally that we, their guides, do not realize the insidious narrowing of our own thinking, the imperceptible shortening of our own Attention Spans to complex issues. The unsuspected diminishing of our own ability to read, write, or think past 140 characters. We must all take stock of who we are as readers, as writers and as thinkers. Good readers, every single one of you, my ability to do that, the good readers of the society are both its canaries which detects the presence of danger to its members and its guardians of our common humanity. The final purpose of the third reading is the ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom just as Margaret Leavy has suggested for the basis of all truism, the combining of our highest intellectual and empathic powers with our capacity for virtue may well be why our species as continued. Of these capacities are endangered, if Good Research are endangered, so are we all. If they are supported, children, youth, all of us, we will have not only an antidote to the weaknesses of the Digital Culture but a key to redressing them. A key to propelling our cultures greatest potential into the future wise actions and now i have one more page to read and i will ask deborah to give the quote, one of my absolute favorite quotes. It is a short one. The future of reading and good readers is the title and this is Toni Morrisons writing, she says work is sublime because it is generative. It makes meaning that secures our differences. Our human difference, the way in which we are like no other life. We die. That may be the meaning of life but we do language and that may be the measure of our lives. From my first letter to the last, these pages celebrate the human driven achievement that is the reading brain. In between its pages my hope is to engage in a dialogue with you, the reader about my concerns, first for the very plasticity of the reading brain that reflects the characteristics of digital media, precipitate the atrophy of our most essential thought processes, critical analysis, empathy and reflection, to the detriment of our Democratic Society. Second, will the formation of these same processes be threatened in our young have not acquired the same brain that all of you have. To be sure, each of these human processes is perennially endangered and yet each has accelerated across the centuries, we can take comfort from that but less comfort is to be found in my third concern. For just as there were misses and evolution in which whole species, traits or abilities vanished because the environment did not support their continuation there can be misses in the epigenetic changes to our cognitive capacity as we rightly, enthusiastically acquire new essential skills that prepare us for a future whose parameters we can barely imagine. This is the digital dilemma that is being acted out this moment in the cognitive aspects and ethical processes now connected in the present reading circuitry. How easy it would be to shortcircuit these processes which made it to where we have been as readers now. How simple it would be to lead to new modes of acquiring knowledge, more knowledge and insidiously ignore the growing gaps between all the information we read and the receding analysis and reflections we apply to it. It will be an act of resistance as david human expressed it to pause for a moment, i call it the brewski and pause in our society, to pause for a moment and examine with all our intelligence who we want to be next and what will be the best combination of faculties in the reading brains of our future generations. You realize the deep reading brain is a real flesh and cranial bone reality is a metaphor for the continuous expansion of human intelligence and virtue. If sometimes im too fearful about shortcircuiting it in future generations i simultaneously hope and trust in the circuits carry potential capacity to embody all of our species exponentially growing, intellectual and moral faculties. This is our generations moment, the time when we decide to take the true measure of our life. If we ask wisely at this cultural and cognitive crossroads. I believe not in life that Charles Darwin hopes for our species future, that we will forge ever more elaborated reading brain circuits capable of endless forms most beautiful. So dear and good reader come home. Godspeed. [applause] thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Thank you, debra. Now we have time for about ten minutes of questions. If you wouldnt mind standing up and speaking loudly so that our cspan colleagues marine . Any questions. Im sure you have them. Why do you think is the difference between the listening brain and the reading brain . Part of the question is what about audiobooks and audiotapes . Or oral history. And it is a beautiful history. One of the things i like to talk about is the extraordinary capacity of oral culture and how socrates asked questions that we can ask today because of all that can happen. Stephanie walker, wherever you are, she used to say this in the chapter we wrote together in tales of literacy, we are not talking about one being superior to the other, we are talking about the differences and advantages, not quote socrates more or less by saying one of the things he said was inside an oral culture, he was opposed to a written culture was because he felt that our use would have this illusion of knowledge before they ever began to delve into it and that dialogue was one of the ways. He said those written words cant talk back. There is extraordinary and wonderful capacity and oral language in the listening brain. It is not at any point talking about one thing being superior. What is that i gained . I am an apologist for the written word. Oral language is one of the most amazing aspect of being human. What is it he said . Language, it is like the music you remember this. One of the most beautiful quotes in the world, we wish we could, all the while, a copper pot, copper kettle. Like the cattle we try to make music for dancing bears all the while, we aspire to make music for the stars. This is for the neuroscientist of music, all the while we hope to make music that will melt the stars. That is oral language. That is the absolute basis for written language but we go even further in my opinion. The written language for so many reasons. I write a lot about this. Am i not doing what i should . I know im not doing what i should. Im very sorry, cspan, very sorry. It is flaubert. It is all in there, everything is in there, that is what we think. Next, i had to come up here with laryngitis, you can ask me another question. Carolyn had so many wonderful ideas. Talk about the Creative Process for generating these books and i understand some of the controversies around and writing. Thats unusual question. The people who have worked with me at the center of reading and research go that this was done by hand. 20,000 wendy nguyen to kill me. The reality is for me, hand writing is an aspect that slows me down and so i really use a combination. I just finished an interview for something called selfawareness that i will send to everybody. Those of you who know me i finally have a webpage. It is live today, barely. I will put it on your but what i do now is a combination. I take 1000 notes. I have a lot of notes on gina cooperberg and i have one notebook that is a notebook about the articles are all the notebooks and i xerox them all. This is all hands written. My insights are handwritten but then the work of all of us who are writers, you know what it is. One of my favorite novelists in the whole wide world, where are you, naomi, back there. My favorite lepidopteras, not everyone knows what that is but she literally studies butterflies and what now the coffin was close to professional, she has been able to show please reader. Everybody read so many of you write books. Naomi is not looking at me so shes probably not here, naomi peers. Where was i . I forgot where i went. Writing. I know why. I stayed in naomis wonderful house and covered the wall with butcher paper. And and it is like an architectural pitch of ideas and when you write, you actually, your thoughts are increased, they are propelled, they are propelled by writing, propelled by moving so i really believe handwriting is a very interesting aspect of development especially for children that i would be remiss ever to see go away. It is an interesting and important aspects like when we do anything, it adds a dimension. I have an architectural plan based on books that are handwritten, the architectural destruction of the houses interior. It is really an odd question. I have a dear friend, jeff. My question, how can we as a society built into english teachers, teacher training schools all over the country these messages early enough that thirdgraders or whatever, can you help to write curricula for them . A lot of people in this room will be helpful. Here is what i want to tell you and you will get a free book because debra, your partner, i have written three chapters, my first proposal for a by literate reading brain. I am walking out on the synaptic lamb if you will, to do this but i decided in one moment in my life i wanted to say how can i put these ideas, this is not binary, but how could we form a brain, brains of our children who are ultimately able to find the right mode for the right purpose of their reading and how can we instruct our teachers into the building of a by literate reading brain so that ultimately, for those of you in education or psychology i really am thinking about these as parallel tracks. To have thought and language and it comes like this and goes underground but you have parallel tracks. I am writing a developmental proposal for a by literate brain in which we have parallel tracks so that in the beginning especially our children are immersed in tactile print and i want to suggest im not outlawing digital but i have some very important cautions about too much of that and i want the development of reading itself to be through print in the beginning and teaching deep reading skills and teaching explicitly, we talked about explicit instructions, we in Research Note explicit instruction is important. I would like to see explicit instruction in deep reading processes go on in the first print medium and explicitly on the screen so that we develop good habits instead of the ones you guys have. Most of you in the research is very clear, theres a colleague in san jose that if you die in something so informal, most of you follow s4s the pattern in your reading. Your skimmers, that is the new mode and when you skim you off and go stamp a little down or go like this, words spot down there. The truth is you have missed all of the work of the writers who have painstakingly chosen every hard won word. I am not here to defend writers right now but i do think, using your question as a platform i do think we will fail in the perception of beauty the more we become so solidly words spotting browsing skimmers. I hope you think what is the purpose of your reading and for many of us the email could use a few words but for the reading i ask you to look at yourself, to examine yourself and not to miss the beauty that language is. We have the most extraordinary faculties in this and even david brooks wrote a column two years ago where he said imperceptibly something has slipped away. Our ability to perceive beauty and appreciate it. We must never allow that to happen. Okay. Thanks. It wasnt even planted. Could have been but wasnt. You are going to be my hardest question. I know it. You mentioned so much loss in the digital age, of beauty, of deep processing, the loss of the contemplative life. With all this loss what do you think is the biggest cognitive appeal of the digital age, what deep part of the human brain . Beautiful question. There is nothing that there are a few view who know that i work with the robotics lab in mit. I am agog with the extraordinary inventiveness, innovation, what the future holds. I really mean this. I cant begin to imagine all that we will invent. This a piece of advice that the Digital World gives us. I cannot when i write this, it is to preserve. It can easily be interpreted that i am opposed to the extraordinary expansion possibility. That there are things that are an aspect of Digital Technology that i think catch us, that i have mixed feelings about, i have very negative worries and very exciting positive feelings about what the expanding capacity, but my goal is to have a balance. I want to expand and preserve and so often we do one or the other. We have the capacity. This is a different transition. We can inform technologies redress its own weaknesses. In effect, some of you certainly stephanie was there at the stanford meeting that i organized in january of this year in which we are looking at Global Literacy and neuroscience in the whole point was how can we, the people who are Digital Technology, with the people who are worried about the loss, how can we do this better . We can and we must and if we dont then my worries im more worried about you but i am not worried about you at all. I knew you would ask the toughest question. I knew it. I think we have im supposed to do something now. What is it . Any other questions . I am going to sign books for anybody who wants. I cant thank you enough. I had a stress test yesterday for the first time in my life and i told the woman is going to be nothing compared to what i have to go through and you have made it so beautiful because this is my first day out. This book will be controversial, not going to be simple but all of us i hope will engage in a dialogue for those who read it and remember you are my gentle good reader, thank you so much. [applause] thank you all for coming. The line will start here and go back this way. We just ask that you purchase your copy. Thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much. Our Author Interview program, after words. Abc news chief White House Correspondent Jonathan Carl provides a behind the scenes look at the administration. Also this weekend, u. S. News World Reports Kenneth Walsh recounts how different president s have handled crises. And if on sunday its highlights from in depth featuring recent interviews with five authors. Find more information in your Program Guides or online