Reading Rewired the Human Brain. What Happens If We Stop Doing It?

I hope that you're having a beautiful holiday break that includes serene moments for doing old-fashioned things like reading. A landmark study released in August revealed that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure almost every day has plummeted 43%. Since 2004, only one in six Americans today describe themselves as daily readers. How much does this matter? According to neuroscientist Marianne Wolf, a leading expert on the reading brain, this is a big deal.

Literacy changes the circuit of the brain of an individual, which collectively changes the way that society thinks, which changes the s way that society works in a democracy or a form of government. So the question is how will the human species learn to preserve its best processes of thinking? This conversation with Marianne, recorded in 2023, is one of our favorites internally. She is just bursting with a contagious passion for the act of reading, a healthy contagion, if there ever was one.

It's worth noting that reading physical books in our increasingly distracted digital age is becoming an ever more radical act. or what the author David Uhlin calls an active resistance in a landscape of distraction. If that's true, then we at the Next Big Idea Club are a kind of joyful dissident group. We'd love to invite you to join the revolution. You can learn more at NextbigIdeaclub.com.

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