## Metadata - Author: [[Maryanne Wolf]] - Full Title: Reader, Come Home - Category: #books ## Highlights - Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the artist in society to that of the canary in the mines: both alert us to the presence of danger. The reading brain is the canary in our minds. We would be the worst of fools to ignore what it has to teach us. ([Location 226](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=226)) - Like St. Thomas Aquinas, I look at disagreement as the place where “iron sharpens iron.” ([Location 229](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=229)) - In contrast to reading, oral language is one of our more basic human functions. As such, it possesses dedicated genes that unfold with minimal assistance to produce our capacities to speak and understand and think with words. ([Location 284](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=284)) - What is fascinating to think about is that our present retinotopic organization, which has been recycled in each new reader to include letters and words, would not be, and indeed is not, the same in the cortex of our past ancestors or in any nonliterate person today. ([Location 428](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=428)) - the reading brain activates in half a second something akin to the daily efforts of poets and writers to find the perfect word, the mot juste,26 that will connect, as E. M. Forster once described it, “prose with passion.” ([Location 497](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=497)) - I think that reading, in its original essence,1 [is] that fertile miracle of communication effected in solitude. . . . We feel quite truly that our wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off. . . . But by a singular and moreover providential law . . . (a law which perhaps signifies that we are unable to receive the truth from anyone else but must create it ourselves), that which is the endpoint of their wisdom appears to us as but the beginning of our own. —Marcel Proust, On Reading ([Location 526](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=526)) - The quality of how we read any sentence or text depends, however, on the choices we make with the time we allocate to the processes of deep reading, regardless of medium. Everything we will consider in this book from this point forward—from the digital culture, the reading habits of our children and their children to the role of contemplation in ourselves and in society—rests on understanding the critically important but never guaranteed allocation of time to the processes that form the deep-reading circuit. ([Location 565](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=565)) - When we reflect that “sentence”10 means, literally, “a way of thinking” . . . we realize that . . . a sentence is both the opportunity and the limit of thought—what we have to think with, and what we have to think in. It is, moreover, a feelable thought. . . . It is a pattern of felt sense. —Wendell Berry ([Location 606](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=606)) - Most of us think we are exercising critical thinking, but if we are honest with ourselves, we realize that we are doing so less than we imagine. We believe we will allocate time to it “later,” that invisible wastebasket of lost intentions. ([Location 950](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=950)) - A recent study by Time Inc.9 of the media habits of people in their twenties indicated that they switched media sources twenty-seven times an hour. On average they now check their cell phone between 150 and 190 times a day. ([Location 1077](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=1077)) - To be a moral human being24 is to pay, be obliged to pay, certain kinds of attention. . . . The nature of moral judgments depends on our capacity for paying attention—a capacity that, inevitably, has its limits, but whose limits can be stretched. —Susan Sontag ([Location 1164](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=1164)) - Andrew Piper and David Ulin argue that the capacity to sequence matters30—both in the physical world and on the printed page, even if less on digital devices. In reading as in life, Piper insists, human beings need a “sense of the pathway,” a knowledge of where they are in time and space that, when needed, allows them to return to things over and over again and learn from them—something he refers to as the technology of recurrence. ([Location 1197](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=1197)) - The question I must confront in my self-appointed role as reading worrier is whether the carefully built internal platforms are being sufficiently formed in our young before they automatically turn to their default intelligence and look up an unknown name or concept. It is not that I prefer internal to external platforms of knowledge; I want both, but the internal one has to be sufficiently formed before automatic reliance on the external ones takes over. Only in this developmental sequence do I trust that they will know when they do not know. ([Location 1356](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=1356)) - Do you, my reader, read with less attention and perhaps even less memory for what you have read? Do you notice when reading on a screen that you are increasingly reading for key words and skimming over the rest? Has this habit or style of screen reading bled over to your reading of hard copy? Do you find yourself reading the same passage over and over to understand its meaning? Do you suspect when you write that your ability to express the crux of your thoughts is subtly slipping or diminished? Have you become so inured to quick précis of information that you no longer feel the need or possess the time for your own analyses of this information? Do you find yourself gradually avoiding denser, more complex analyses, even those that are readily available? Very important, are you less able to find the same enveloping pleasure you once derived from your former reading self? Have you, in fact, begun to suspect that you no longer have the cerebral patience to plow through a long and demanding article or book? What if, one day, you pause and wonder if you yourself are truly changing and, worst of all, do not have the time to do a thing about it? ([Location 1461](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=1461)) - Like Frank Schirrmacher, the neuroscientist Daniel Levitin places such attention-flitting, task-switching behavior within the context of our evolutionary reflex, the novelty bias that pulls our attention immediately toward anything new: “Humans will work just as hard to obtain8 a novel experience as we will to get a meal or a mate. . . . In multitasking, we unknowingly enter an addiction loop as the brain’s novelty centers become rewarded for processing shiny new stimuli, to the detriment of our prefrontal cortex, which wants to stay on task and gain the rewards of sustained effort and attention. We need to train ourselves to go for the long reward, and forgo the short one.” ([Location 1647](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=1647)) - “multitasking creates a dopamine-addiction feedback9 loop, effectively rewarding the brain for losing focus and for constantly searching for external stimulation.” ([Location 1663](https://readwise.io/to_kindle?action=open&asin=B074DTJ2CT&location=1663))