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 conclusion the most important contribution of the invention of written language to the species is a Democratic Foundation for critical inferential reasoning and reflective capacity. This is the basis of our collected conscious. If we in the 21st century are to preserve a vital collective conscious you must ensure that all members of our society are able to read and think both of deeply and well and 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 or in our own backyard. We will fail as a society if we do not educate our children and reeducate all of our citizenry to the responsibility of each citizen to process information the jointly, critically and wisely across all medium and we will fail as a society as surely as societies of the 20th century if we do not recognize and acknowledge the capacity for reflective reasoning in those who disagree with us. Falsely raised hopes and falsely raised fears trump reason and the capacity for reflective thinking receipts along with his influence on rational empathic decision making, most people would never become aware of this just as i worry in overreliance of external forces of information, our young will not know what they do not know. I worry equally that we, their guide do not realize the narrow of our own thinking, the Attention Span to complex issues, the unsuspecting diminishing to think past 40 characters. We must all take stock of who we are as readers, as writers and as thinkers. Every single one of you i proclaim is a good reader, its my ability to do that ones. [laughter] the good readers of a society are both canaries which detect presence of danger to its members and the final of third reading is the ability to transform information into knowledge and knowledge into wisdom. Just as margaret levy suggested, the combining, the combining of highest electual and empathic powers with our capacity for virtuema well be why rbc has continued. If these capacities are endangered, if good readers are in danger, so are we all, if they are supported children, youth, all of us, we will have not only an antidote to the weakness of Digital Culture but key to addressing them, a key to propelling our cultures greatest potential into the future, wise action. Now i have one more page to read and i will ask debra to give quote, one of my absolute favorite quotes from morrison. Its a short one. Tony morrisons writing, word work is sublime because generative, the way in which we are like no other life, we die, thats makes that maybe the meaning of life. But we do language and that may be the measure of our lives. Pages celebrate the achievement of the brain. In between the pages my hope to engage in dialogue with you, the reader, about my concerns, first, the plasticity and precipitate most essential thought process, critical analysis, empathy and reflection to the detriment of our democratic society. Second, will the formation of the same processes be threatened in our young who have not acquired the same brain that all of you have. To be sure each of the human processes is endangered, 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 miss in evolution in which whole species traces vanished because the environment did not support their continuation, there can be misses in the genetic changes to cognitive capacities 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 thats been acted out this moment in the cognitive affective and ethical processes now connected in the present reading circutry and now threatened. How easy would be to short circuit the processes which have made us who we have been as readers till now. How simple it would be to leap to new modes of acquiring knowledge, more knowledge, more quickly and insidiously ignore the growing gaps between all the information we read and the receding analysis and reflection we apply to it. It would be an act of resistance as david ulin expressed it. To pause for a moment, to pause for a moment and examine with all our intelligence who we want to be next and what will be the best faculties in the reading brains of our future generations. Im so glad you guys are here. [laughter] im so happy. By now you realize that the deep reading brain is both a real flesh and cranial bone reality for expansion of human intelligence and virtue. If sometimes i am too fearful about shortcircuiting it in future generations, i simultaneously hope and trust in this circuit potential capacity to embody all of our species exponentially growing, intellectual, effective and moral faculty. This is our generations moment, the time when we decide to take the true measure of our lives. If we act wisely at this cultural and cognitive cross roads, i believe not unlike what Charles Darwin hoped for our species future that we will energy ever more brain circuits capable of endless forms most beautiful. So dear and good reader, come home. [applause] god speed. Thank you. Thank you very much. [applause] i really appreciate it. Thank you, debra. So now we have a time for about 10 minutes and if you wouldnt mind standing up and speaking up so that our cspan colleagues can any questions . Im sure you have them. Yes. Why do you think is the difference between the listening brain and the reading brain . And part of that question is what about audio books and audiotapes or or oral history. And oral history and its a beautiful history and, you know, one of the things i should stay over here. One of the things i like to talk about is the extraordinary capacities of oral culture and how socrates ask questions that we can ask today because all that can happen in culture. Stephanie, wherever you are, she used to say in a chapter that 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 the advantages in different ones and i will quote socrates more or less, one of the things he said that inside an oral culture while he was oppose to rent itchen culture because he felt that our youth would have illusion of knowledge before they ever begun to really delve into it and dialogue was one of the ways. The written words they cant talk back, well, theres extraordinary and wonderful capacities in oral language in the listening brain. I was thinking you. Going to go into the audio which i have interesting things to say but i wont do that today but its not that at any point im talking about one thing being superior, im saying what is it that we have gained, im an apologist for the written word. If you [laughter] it is not that oral language, oh, my goodness, one the most amazing aspects of being a human. What is he that he said language, its like the music that dancing bear. You remember this . Cant we get this to us . The most beautiful quotes in the world but its all about we wish we could all the while its a somebody out here help me. [laughter] language is like we try to make music for bears all the while, we aspire to make music for the stars. Theyre all scientists of music. We hope to make music that will melt the stars, thats what it is, that will melt the stars, thats all language, thats the absolute beginning base, basis for written language, but we go even further in my opinion, the written language for so many reasons that you know it and i write a lot about that, am i not doing what i should, i know im not doing what i should, so im very sorry, cspan, very sorry. [laughter] apology. [laughter] see it all in there. Its what we think. Okay. Next, next brave soul. I had to come up with laryngitis. You have to ask me another question. Carolyn, carolyn, had so many wonderful ideas, carolyn. Yes, maam. Talk to us a little bit about the Creative Process for generating this book and i understand handwriting and some of the controversies around handwriting might factor into this a little bit. Thats an unusual question. So the people who have worked with me at the center for reading and Language Research know that the entirety was done by hand, okay [laughter] 20,000 my poor wendy wanted to kill me, but the reality is, for many handwriting is an aspect that activates that slows me down and so i really use a combination, carolyn, i have just finished an interview for something called shelf awareness that i will send to everybody. Those of you who know me, i finally have a web page its live today barely. I will put it on there but what i do now is not is a combination, so i take a thousand notes. Lets say jena, i put it in notebook and i have a notebook that tells me where all articles are in all notebooks and ixerox them all. This is all written. [laughter] but then the work of what all of white house are writers, you know what it is, one of my favorite novelists in the whole wide world, naomi, where are you, not everyone knows what that is, she literally studies butterflies and it was professional. She has been able to show that hes right so please read her everybody read, so many of you write books. Naomi is not looking at me, where was i . I forgot where i went. Writing, okay. [laughter] i know why, naomi, i stayed in naomis wonderful house and i covered every wall with butcher paper, and the butcher paper, sorry, i do this for every letter or chapter i make outlines and then i take all of the notes and its like architectural sketch of ideas and when you write you actually your thoughts are increased, they are propelled by writing, and so i really believe that handwriting is an interesting aspect of development especially for children that i would be i think i would be remiss ever to see it go away. I think its a very interesting and important aspect. Its like, you know, when we do anything, it adds a dimension. So i really have architectural plan from my book thats based on the notes that are handwritten, the insights into the notes, the design interior, thank you, carolyn, thats an odd question. [laughter] now i have a friend, jeff. How can we, how can society build into english teachers and teachertraining schools all over the country a lot of people in this room will be very helpful. Its wonderful. Here is what i want to tell you, jeff, and youre going to get a free book because debra is your partner. [laughter] so i have written 3 chapters in what was my first for biliterary brain. Im walking out on a limb if you will to do this but i decided that in one moment in my life i wanted to say how can i put all of these ideas and not binary and brain of our children and ultimately able to find the right mold for the right purpose of their reading and how can we instruct our teaches into teachers of a biliterary brain. Those who are in education, i really am thinking about these parallel tracks. Remember of thought and language and comes like this and goes underground, you have the parallels, well, im in this book writing a developmental proposal for a biliterate and im suggesting its not that im outlawing digital but i have very important cautions about too much of that and i really want to development of reading itself to be through print in the beginning and teaching the deepreading skills and then teaching explicitly, we talk about explicit instruction. And i would like to see explicit processes go on in the first to print mediums and explicitly on the screen so that we develop good habits instead of the ones that you guys have. Most of you and the research is very clear, the colleague in san jose, you guys, you guys, excuse me for being so informal, most of you follow and f or a z pattern in reading because youre a skimmer and when you skimmer you go, sample little down. You go like this. Spot down there. The truth is you have missed all the work of the writers who have painstakingly read and chose ever every hard word. Well, im not here to defend writers right now but i do think and im using your question as a platform, jeff, thank you. I do think we will fail in the apperception of beauty the more we become solidly words body browsing skimmers, what is the purpose of your reading, for many of us the email can darn well use f or a z but a reading thats important, i ask you to look at yourself, to examine yourself and not to miss the beauty that language is, thats part of what your question, and we have extraordinary faculty in language, recent language and even david wrote a comment about navy two years ago, something has slipped away, our ability to perceive beauty and appreciate it, we must never allow that happen, ever. Okay, thanks, jeff. It wasnt even planted. Could have been but it wasnt. [laughter] good. Youre going to be my hardest question, i know it. Well, yes, you mentioned theres so much loss in a digital age, you said theres a loss, well, just now of beauty, theres a loss of deep processing, loss of a third life, so with all of this loss, what do you think is the biggest cognitive appeal of the digital age, what deep part of the human brain loves it . Beautiful question. You know, there is nothing that i and theres a few of you here who know that i work occasion with robotics lab at mit. I am a gog of extraordinary inventiveness, what the future holds and i really mean this, i cant even begin to imagine all that we will invent and this is a piece of us that digital, the Digital World gives us in spades. I cannot when i write this, it is to preserve. It can easily be interpreted that i am opposed to the extraordinary expansion possibility, but there are certain things that are an aspect of Digital Technology that i think are going that catch us that i have mixed feelings for so i have both negative worries about preserving and i have very exciting positive feelings about what the expanding. But my goal is to have a balance, i want to expand and preserve and so often we use we do one or the other. Well, we have the capacity, this is a different transition. We can inform technology to readdress its own weakens and some of you, stephanie was at stanford meeting in which we are looking at local literally and science and how can we yolk the people that are doing Digital Technology with people that are word about the loss, how with we do this better, we can and we must and if we dont, my worries are going to, you know, im more word about you than me. [laughter] but im not word about you at all, i knew you would ask the toughest question, i knew it. [laughter] i think we have im supposed to do something now. Oh, my god. Any other questions . Then im actually going to sign books for a few as long as anybody wants me to basically. You know, thank you,i cant thank you enough. I had a stress test for the first time in my life and i told the woman, i said, its 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 is going to be controversial, its not going to be simple, but all of us i hope will engage in the dialogue in the book who read it and remember you are my gentle good reader, thank you so much. [applause] thank you all for coming, we will have her sign books, the line will start here and go back this way and we ask that you purchase the copy before you ask to sign. Thank you so much for [inaudible conversations]