What You Need to Know About Brain Plasticity

This is the second in a series of posts about Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home. You can read the introductory post along with links to other posts in the series here.

The above quote sums up brain plasticity. A more familiar way to say it is, “Use it or lose it.”

A lot of what Maryanne Wolf has to say depends on the concept of brain plasticity. The circuitry of our brain is dependent on its environment. What we read (or don’t read) can lead to growth or atrophy.

The point of all this in Reader, Come Home is to say that reading is not a guarantee, a given, a thing to be taken for granted. The digital stimuli we come across does something to our brain, and we’d be wise to wonder how it impacts us, and how it impacts our kids.

According to Wolf, our brain circuitry can develop deep reading capabilities, but it can also be trained to favor shallow reading. The amount of time we spend reading deeply versus shallowly can impact our very brain structure.

This is important for adults, because our own reading circuit can be altered by the input we feed it. Just because we were excellent readers ten years ago, doesn’t mean we are anymore.

This is important for kids, because they are in danger of not developing a deep reading circuit in the first place. As Wolf puts it:

“The unnatural, cultural origin of literacy…means that young readers do not have a genetically based program for developing [a reading] circuit.”

-Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home

In sum, what we read (and how we read) are not matters of mere preference or disposition. Deep reading and shallow reading contribute to different types of reading circuits. Deep reading, as we’ll see later, is connected to deep thought, while shallow reading can lead to both moral and intellectual shallowness.

So what constitutes deep and shallow reading? We’ll discuss each in the next two posts.

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