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