Good evening. I am claire and on behalf of Harvard Bookstore thank you for joining us sport event with Maryanne Wolf whos here to discuss her new book, reader, come home the reading brain in a Digital World. I would like to tell you about our summer events. Fiction fridays and for the rest of august in stored new fiction pervert purchases are 15 off every friday for members of our frequent Buyer Program and next line they we welcome jack e davis in his new book. Wednesday the 15th, roy scranton is in conversation with andrew to discuss scrantons new book. Both of these events begin at 7 00 p. M. And are here at the bookstore. Labor day is around the corner. We are thrilled to welcome authors like john kerry, deborah harkness, Walter Mosley and many others. You more about these in our Upcoming Events on a website harvard. Com. events or on the sale of flyers. After todays talks we will have time for questions. Cspan is here taping. As a request we ask that stand up and speak loudly so they can pick it up. Please know you will be recorded. Following q a we will have book signing at this table. Reader, come home is available for sale in the next room and for today only is 20 off. Part of how we say thank you for buying your book at Harvard Bookstore. Your purchases make nice events possible, so thank you. I would also like to thank you in advance and gently remind you to ideally turn off at a minimum silence your cell phones for the duration of tonights event. Some phones will probably go off and you will feel so superior that its your neighbors and not yours. Tonight we are joined by Maryanne Wolf, visiting professor at ucla where she heads up the center for dyslexia and social justice and is no stranger to for many years she served as a professor of citizenship and Public Service and director for the center for reading and language and development. She has been honored with multiple research and teaching honors including fulbright fellowship of the American Psychological association of Teaching Award and cofounded curious learning Global Literacy initiative. You may also be familiar with her last book. Since the dawn of time or at least the 60s weve been told tv rots our brains and in the digital era has entered our lexicon, but when it comes to reading is there such a thing as to technology and what are the consequences . How does reading on a screen effect reasoning ability or Attention Span . In her new book, reader, come home it she answers these questions and more with a series of letters. She looks at how our brain is changing in response to digital age. Its a mustread for anyone who spends her down a computer and anyone raising a child in this brave new world of ours. Reader, come home is one of the falls most anticipated books and beavers have called it lively ambitious and deeply informative. We are pleased to have Maryanne Wolf here tonight so please join me in welcoming her to Harvard Bookstore. [applause]. Thank you so much. I cant believe i have seen someone a friends in five minutes and i have not seen you for so long. I would love it if you could just sit on the floor those of you there especially well. So creative. [laughter] please follow wills example, please. Fire rules, oh. For heavens sake. Actually, im just acura some of you know from france and of the last thing i did actually was swimming one of those very cold swiss alps rivers and i lost my voice for my first reading. [laughter] my friend wheres deborah . Deborah occasionally will read some quotes for me beginning with the first one, but its not as a neuroscientist, but more like emily dickinson. I dont know if you remember this one beautiful poem, the soul selects her own society and then closes the doors. Thats what we are going to do tonight. You are my very very special society. I had a fantasy and clear wont allow me to do it, but my fantasy is that someday i will come and do a reading with you, my select society and say books on house. [laughter] i dont know why, but this is my great fantasy. For cspan, went to tell you that you did Something Wonderful for me and for people that have had hangovers on new years eve because they putting my new years day and all these people whove never would have heard a thing or read anything by me would come up and say i remember you. [laughter] so, thank you cspan for doing this tonight. Im going to actually begin by saying im going to speak about 35 minutes and with deborahs help deborah is a pharmacy a better communications, but really what i love about her is that shes my favorite soprano. Shes agreed to help me reach some of them. This is a book of letters and its a book of letters because i do not have the last word. I have words and i look at so many people who i have worked with, kennedy who is a linguist, all of you who are here love words. A letter is opening to two sets of words. In a certain sense and letters tripoli blessed because it gives me a chance to give you the best of my ability and hope that it elicits the last. In the first letter that i wont read to you im only going to read the last piece of the last letter. I quote. He said iron sharpens arc iron and thats really almost the dilemma that we are in in the Digital World. We are all progressing in extraordinary ways. Its never going to be a binary, this discussion and the letter enables me to in fact by the very structure of the book thing we are entering the dilemma of this age together and her thoughts will sharpen mine and i hope my thoughts will sharpen yours and i look at my Young Readers here and im just so excited. Thank you so much for bringing them. Deborah, i would like you to just begin with a quote from david that is the beginning of my last letter nine and then i will proceed. Hello, everyone. 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 an odd sort of distraction, distraction masquerading as being in the know and such a landscape knowledge can help the fall prey to illusion albeit an illusion thats deeply seductive with its promise of speech to lead us to elimination that its more important to react and twos think deeply. Reading is an active contemplation, connected resistance in the landscape of distraction. It returns us to a reckoning with time. Now im going to begin a letter and i need you to realize that the books title this is the second time my book title got changed. Of this title should have been letters to the good reader you will see why in all of my colleagues who know how much work i do with dyslexia know there are a lot of different meetings to a good reader, but you will see that i was trying to in some way give gratitude, not to the lyrical beauty of letters to the young poet that some of you have read, but to give homage to a man who through letters try to give his best to someone he would never know he would never meet and so my letters are in essence the hope that a dialogue can be had with people i will never meet. Heres my dear reader, when i was very young i thought the good reader meant that one could read all of the books that filled to tiny shelves in a two room schoolhouse. When i began to study in places where books were so many that they filled multiple Library Buildings with levels deep under the ground i thought that good reader must mean reading as many of those books as possible in making their knowledge ones own. When i was a young teacher in a place where teachers had long left my only thought was that if i could not help those children become good readers they would never leave the borders of their families indentured lives in berlin to lie. When i first became a researcher i chased when studies would compare good readers with children and individuals with dyslexia who worked harder than almost anyone else to understand and read text. Finally, when i studied what the brain does when it retrieves the meanings of words gina. [laughter] i learned that every meeting i could for a good reader would be activated when i thought of it. I have added a new meaning as discussed in my induction. In the ethics aristotle wrote that a good society has three lives. The life of knowledge and productivity, the life of entertainment within the greeks very particular understanding of leisure and finally the life of contemplation. So too i believe are the three lives of the good reader. Theres the first life of the good reader in gathering information and acquiring knowledge and we are all awash in that life. Theres a second life in which readings vary form of entertainment are to be found in abundance for sheer distraction and with the pleasure of emergence in stories of other lives, in articles about mysterious new we discovered some planets, imphal ones that steals our breath away. Weve read to take this most economic transport away from our frantically pursued everyday life. The third life of the good reader is the culmination of reading and determinants of the other two lives. The reflective life in which whatever genre we are reading we enter a totally invisible personal realm, a private holy ground where we can contemplate all manner of human existence and ponder the universe whose real mystery worth any of our imagination. Theologian john donne wrote that our culture fully embodies aristotles first wife of good society, but receives each day from the third contemplative life. So too i think the third life of the good reader, now there is no work no shorter shortage of contemporary that the meditative dimension and human being is threatened by an overwhelming emphasis on materialism, consumerism and a fractured relationship with time. As Steve Wasserman asked, does that you sos acceleration pride by the internet diminish our capacity for the liberation and enfeeble our capacity for genuine reflection . Does the davie daily information banish the space needed for actual wisdom . Readers know in their bones something we forget our peril that without books indeed without literacy the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs unquote. If we are to evaluate the truth in such descriptions of a Digital Culture we must examine ourselves without a cognitive flinch and look at who we are now, both as readers and as habitants they shared planets. Many changes in our thinking always much to our biological reflex the novelty bias, to novel stimulates so to survive as a culture excuse me, to attend novel stimulates to survive. As that even though i wrote it or queen had this novelty bias and as a species we had to look at all of these to survive whether its a predatory or pray and im suggesting that the changes in our thinking today always much to that biological reflex to attend to novel to stimulate as to a culture that floods as with continuous stimulate with our collusion. It will be what we do next with our growing consciousness of these changes that matter, whether we exacerbate the negative changes by ignoring them or redress them with increased knowledge. This will depend in part on what all of us do next. Whether we are able to attend to our capacity for reflection in this teapot is a matter of personal choice with critical applications not only for us as individuals, but for us as citizens. John donne saw the loss of this as related to the rise in violence and conflict in the society. I see it more as an outcome of our new years unforeseen the constant need for efficiency buying time without knowing for what purpose, decreasing Attention Spans pushed beyond their cognitive limits by distractions and information that will never become knowledge. And increasingly manipulated and superficial uses of knowledge that will never become wisdom. In the first task of the 20th century t. S. Eliot wrote wheres the wisdom we have lost and knowledge . Where is the knowledge we have lost and information . In the First Quarter of our century we daily conflate information with knowledge. And knowledge with wisdom with the resulting effect of all three. Exemplified by the interactive dynamic that governs our deep reading processes. Only the allocation of time to our inferential and critical analytical functions can transform information into knowledge that can then be consolidated into memory, only this internal knowledge in turn will draw us, enable us to make analysis and in pursuance with the new information. The discernment of truth and the value of new information depend on our allocation of time to the critical analytic processes during these moments together you are not done. At least 15 more minutes. Sorry. I ask that you try on with the great writer described as a rhythm of time that passes with no other aim than to let seat feelings and thoughts settle down, mature and shed all inpatients were in femoral compression c. Eat use the latin expression which translates as hurry up. [laughter] he wanted to stress 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 that i and allow your thoughts to settle and be still so as to be poised for what will follow. I want children to learn want ce capacity for cognitive patients. I ask you all now to reclaim but we all may have lost. Gives you release from the way most of us including myself now read, fast as you can, slowly only if you must. To put assess cognitive 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 when fortunate the insights to unfold. Few historical individuals, the life altering importance of the joy of reading even in the dire circumstances described in some of my other work bought hoffer wrote one of the most moving books ive ever read, letters and papers from prison after being thrown into concentration camps for his views on nazi germany took the letters portray it and battled spirit kept alive in very large parts by what he could read to himself, the one luxury his 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 like von hoffer will know where to find the many forms of joy that reside in the secret hiding places in the reading life and the sanctuary it gives all of us who seek it. In the recent essay about the values of our nation, Marilyn Robinson wrote quote i believe that we stand at a threshold as he did and that the example of his life obliges me to speak about the gravity of our historical moments as i see it end of the knowledge that no society at any time is immune to moral catastrophe. We 08 to him we zero it to him to acknowledge a bitter lesson he learned before us that these challenges can be understood too late unquote. We live in a historical moments as historian Robert Barton once called it, we are en route to hold new forms of munication, 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 its too late if we choose to do so. We need to confront the reality when we are bombarded with too many options our default can be to rely on information that places to few demands upon our thinking. More and more of us within think we know something based on information whose source was chosen because it conforms to how and what we thought before. Bus, though we are seemingly well armed with information there begins to be less and less motivation to think for deeply much less try on views that differ from our own. We think we know enough that misleading that moses into a form of passive cognitive complacency that precludes further reflection and opens why did the door for others to think for us. This is a long known recipe for intellectual social and moral neglect in the fraying of societal order. At stake here is the ultimate message of the book that any version of the digital chain hypothesis which you have to read the book to understand. Im sorry. Poses threat to the use of our most reflective capacity if we remain unaware of this potential with all its profound applications for the future of a democratic society. The gradual disuse of our analytical and reflective capacities as individuals are the worst enemies of a Truly Democratic Society for whatever reason in what ever medium in whatever stage. My voice is going down so i would like you to come back. The worst atrocities of the 20th century there witness tragically to what occurred when a Society Fails to examine its own actions and sees its analytical powers to those who tell them how to think and what to fear. He described this 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 in a large part of mankind. Indeed, this seems actually to be a psychological and sociological loss, the power of some to the folly of others. It is not the certain human capacities, intellectual capacities that 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 actually 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 that those of the 20th century ignore those of the 20th century and failed to evaluate whether we have already begun to cede our critical powers and independent judgment to others in our society excuse me, to others in our increasingly fissured society full of cracks for those young people. Few people if pressed would contest such dish management of our critical faculty has already begun. What would be contested is in whom and what. I could never have imagined that Research Without changing in the reading brain and i have one for colleagues here are done similar research, most of which reflect increasing adaptation to a Digital Culture would have implications for democratic society. If that is my conc