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    Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
    Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
    Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World
    Audiobook6 hours

    Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

    Written by Maryanne Wolf

    Narrated by Kirsten Potter

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    From the author of Proust and the Squid, a lively, ambitious, and deeply informative epistolary book that considers the future of the reading brain and our capacity for critical thinking, empathy, and reflection as we become increasingly dependent on digital technologies.

    A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we think and feel. Since then, the ways we process written language have changed dramatically with many concerned about both their own changes and that of children. New research on the reading brain chronicles these changes in the brains of children and adults as they learn to read while immersed in a digitally dominated medium.

    Drawing deeply on this research, this book comprises a series of letters Wolf writes to us—her beloved readers—to describe her concerns and her hopes about what is happening to the reading brain as it unavoidably changes to adapt to digital mediums. Wolf raises difficult questions, including:

    • Will children learn to incorporate the full range of ""deep reading"" processes that are at the core of the expert reading brain?
    • Will the mix of a seemingly infinite set of distractions for children’s attention and their quick access to immediate, voluminous information alter their ability to think for themselves?
    • With information at their fingertips, will the next generation learn to build their own storehouse of knowledge, which could impede the ability to make analogies and draw inferences from what they know?
    • Will all these influences, in turn, change the formation in children and the use in adults of ""slower"" cognitive processes like critical thinking, personal reflection, imagination, and empathy that comprise deep reading and that influence both how we think and how we live our lives?
    • Will the chain of digital influences ultimately influence the use of the critical analytical and empathic capacities necessary for a democratic society?
    • How can we preserve deep reading processes in future iterations of the reading brain?
    • Who are the ""good readers"" of every epoch?

    Concerns about attention span, critical reasoning, and over-reliance on technology are never just about children—Wolf herself has found that, though she is a reading expert, her ability to read deeply has been impacted as she has become, inevitably, increasingly dependent on screens.

    Wolf draws on neuroscience, literature, education, technology, and philosophy and blends historical, literary, and scientific facts with down-to-earth examples and warm anecdotes to illuminate complex ideas that culminate in a proposal for a biliterate reading brain. Provocative and intriguing, Reader, Come Home is a roadmap that provides a cautionary but hopeful perspective on the impact of technology on our brains and our most essential intellectual capacities—and what this could mean for our future.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperAudio
    Release dateAug 7, 2018
    ISBN9780062848642
    Author

    Maryanne Wolf

    Maryanne Wolf, the John DiBiaggio Professor of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University, was the director of the Tufts Center for Reading and Language Research. She currently directs the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA, and is working with the Dyslexia Center at the UCSF School of Medicine and with Curious Learning: A Global Literacy Project, which she co-founded. She is the recipient of multiple research and teaching honors, including the highest awards by the International Dyslexia Association and the Australian Learning Disabilities Association. She is the author of Proust and the Squid (HarperCollins), Tales of Literacy for the 21st Century (Oxford University Press), and more than 160 scientific publications.

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    Reviews for Reader, Come Home

    4.5/5

    58 ratings5 reviews

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    • 5/5
      I am listening a book on Power of reading brain ??.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      After listening I chose to purchase a copy to hold in my hands and savor.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 3/5
      Had some interesting points but lacked some authenticity. The word usage and phrase structure seemed elevated and repetitive. Sensed a bit of equating American empirism with good democracy.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      It's a good book but not as an audiobook. You miss a lot of the meaning within this book.

      2 people found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This book invites to have a conversation with Maryanne Wolf through beautifully expressed and creatively written insights about the today's reader and the future reader. And so it's a must read for whoever believes research papers to be boring; read and become the reader.

      2 people found this helpful