What is the main message of Reader, Come Home?

The main message of Reader, Come Home is the importance of reconnecting with deep reading in the digital age.

How long does it take to read Reader, Come Home?

The reading time for Reader, Come Home varies, but it typically takes a few hours. The Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is Reader, Come Home a good book? Is it worth reading?

Reader, Come Home is a thought-provoking and insightful book, definitely worth reading for anyone interested in the impacts of technology on reading.

Who is the author of Reader, Come Home?

The author of Reader, Come Home is Maryanne Wolf.

Reader, Come Home Summary of Key Ideas and Review

Name: Reader, Come Home
Rating: 4.6 (256 reviews)
Author: Maryanne Wolf

Introduction

What’s in it for me? Reassess your relationship with reading.

The days when the distinction between our digital lives and what used to be called IRL or “in real life” are long gone. Today, they’re two sides of the same coin. We upload our supposedly offline activities and talk about what we’ve seen and read online with our friends, colleagues and families. That, critics claim, is wreaking havoc across society. We’re sleeping less, being increasingly anxious, arguing more and – ultimately – losing touch with reality.

So are we really looking down the barrel of total civilizational collapse? American neuroscientist and author Maryanne Wolf doesn’t think so – not yet, at least. An expert on the “reading brain,” she’s seen what digital dependence can do to our ability to sit still and concentrate on a single subject for more than five minutes. That has serious social consequences: testing early literacy, after all, is one of the best ways of predicting whether a child will complete their education or end up in prison.

Those kinds of problems, she claims, can be fixed. The solutions won’t be found in a romantic, back-to-nature movement that renounces all things digital. Instead, we need to pay closer attention to the way we’re teaching kids to read and thus think in a deep, sustained manner. And that’s a skill both digital and analog media can help cultivate – the trick is knowing which medium works in which context and why.

In the following blinks, you’ll learn

why our brains respond so positively to the addictive aspects of online culture;
how humans first learned to read and why we seem to be unlearning that ability; and
what Aristotle can teach us about cultivating a healthier relationship with new media.

Key idea 1 of 8

Reading is a skill that we learn as our brains develop rather than an innate ability.

The human brain is a miraculous machine capable of all sorts of astounding feats. Some of that is innate: we’re born with genes that allow our bodies and minds to acquire certain natural abilities without needing to be taught them. Most people, for example, enter the world with an inborn ability to see and hear, as well as with an astounding ability to pick up language. Just think of the sponge-like manner in which children learn to speak by aping the sounds uttered by those around them.

Reading is an entirely different matter. Unlike speaking, it isn’t hardwired into the brain. That makes it much more like our ability to understand and manipulate numbers: it’s a cultural invention rather than an innate trait. And our ancestors only started reading 6,000 years ago, making it a pretty recent addition to the cognitive toolkit in the grand scheme of human evolution. So how exactly did they – and how do we – learn to read?

To answer that question, we need to get into the nitty-gritty of neuroscience. As we learn to read, the brain develops a new network specifically designed for that task. That’s a product of the brain’s neuroplasticity – its ability to rearrange and reroute existing neuronal networks to create entirely new ones.

This kind of cerebral construction work is a constant throughout our lives. The brain is always linking up cell clusters in novel ways. Each cluster within these configurations simultaneously works to support a budding skill like reading. That, in turn, creates a new network. That process is expedited by the brain’s ability to draw on established networks which perform adjacent functions. Reading, for example, draws on cell clusters associated with language and vision.

But because networks are created in response to specific needs rather than being drawn from some kind of mental masterplan, we all develop slightly different neuronal networks. What they end up looking like depends on what we’re reading and which language we’re using. That means the circuitry in the head of someone who reads in characters like a Chinese speaker will be wired differently to that of someone who’s used to an alphabet, like an English or Arabic speaker.

Neuroplasticity also means that our ability to read changes over time. In the following blinks, we’ll see how it’s changing in response to the digital age.

Key idea 2 of 8

Our deep-reading abilities are being altered by the digital age, and we need them more than ever.

Anyone who’s ever flicked through a magazine or skim-read a newspaper knows that it’s not the same experience as attentive close reading. So what exactly is the difference? Well, let’s take a look at deep reading.

As the name suggests, it’s a type of reading which delves into texts rather than gliding across their surfaces. More to the point, it gives rise to a number of unique processes. When we read deeply, we construct images to aid our understanding even if these pictures aren’t explicit in the text itself.

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Key idea 3 of 8

Our attention is ever-more fragmented, which hinders deep reading.

We’ve just seen that our reliance on the latest tech can change the way we think about others, but that isn’t the only symptom of the terminally online: we’re also losing our ability to read deeply.

In the past, people swallowed information whole. They’d devour a novel or sling back a hefty portion of the daily newspaper. That’s changed. Our attention spans have shrunk while our appetite for data has grown. Take it from the University of San Diego’s Global Information Industry Center, which estimates that most of us consume a whopping 34 gigabytes of information every day – the equivalent of 100,000 words.

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Key idea 4 of 8

Children are highly susceptible to fragmented attention spans, which has a serious effect on their brains.

Multitasking is the new normal. There’s a good reason for that: our brains actually enjoy rapidly moving between different tasks. Why? Call it a novelty bias – an inbuilt cognitive preference for anything new and attention-grabbing.

And because flitting from one thing to the next triggers the brain’s reward center, multitasking is part of an addictive cycle. That’s in stark contrast to the slow-release satisfaction we gain from paying sustained attention to something – a habit that requires patience and careful training.

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Key idea 5 of 8

Parents who read to their children do more for their development than screens ever could.

What’s your fondest childhood memory? One experience usually stands out to a lot of folks: listening to a parent reading them a bedtime story. That isn’t just a pleasant rite of childhood – it also aids children’s cognitive development.

So how does that work? The first thing to note is that it’s a comforting, tactile experience to sit in a parent’s lap and let their words wash over you. That, in turn, cements a positive emotional association in a child’s brain with aspects of reading like attention, memory and language. Then there’s something called shared attention – the ability to focus on the same object as another person without curtailing your own curiosity. Listening to a story being read out loud is a great way of establishing that skill.

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Key idea 6 of 8

There is a crisis in reading in the United States, which is why it’s crucial children of all ages receive support.

That’s the conclusion of the 2003 National Assessment of Adult Literacy survey. According to its research, 93 million people in the United States can only read at or below a basic level. The National Assessment of Educational Progress meanwhile concludes that 60 percent of American fourth-graders – kids aged between nine and ten – aren’t fully proficient readers.

The worry here isn’t just that children are missing out on the joys of a good book: poor literacy levels have far-reaching effects on society. Cinthia Coletti, a philanthropist and the author of Blueprint for a Literate Nation, points out that there’s a clear causal relationship between fourth-grade reading levels and the likelihood of students dropping out of school later on. That link between literacy and social outcomes in later life is so well-established that state Bureaus of Prisons all over the United States use statistical data on reading levels to determine how many prison beds it’ll need!

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Key idea 7 of 8

To prepare for the future, we should nurture children’s brains with the best of both worlds.

So far we’ve seen what our changing relationship with information and knowledge is doing to our ability to learn and read. Does that mean we should shun technology and revert to analog lifestyles?

Not really. A better bet is encouraging kids to become fully fluent in both print and digital mediums just as bilingual children achieve fluency in two languages. After all, each medium has its own strengths. When it comes to reading, for example, non-digital sources are much more effective at giving kids the tools they need to think for themselves. Physical books, the author argues, should be the principal focus during the first years of schooling.

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Key idea 8 of 8

Protecting our third life as readers preserves our ability to turn knowledge into wisdom.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle identified the three “lives” of a good society: one devoted to knowledge and productivity, another to entertainment and the third to contemplation. That’s a pretty good model for the lives of readers.

Like members of Aristotle’s ideal society, readers must also balance their three lives if they wish to be their best selves. Here’s how it works. The first life is all about learning and gathering knowledge – think of looking something up on Google or in a dictionary. In the second mode, readers relish the things which entertain them like testing their wits as they follow with the deductions of a sleuth in a murder mystery or discovering fascinating historical facts. This is ultimately where we find an escape from the pressures of everyday life.

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