Heeding the Call: Maryanne Wolf's Reader Come Home

11 December 2025

Heeding the Call: Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

Maryanne Wolf, born in 1947, is a 78-year-old literacy advocate. She has bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English Literature, and a PhD from Harvard in cognitive neuroscience and psycholinguistics. She has pioneered studies and developed resources for literacy, especially focusing on children with reading differences like dyslexia. She is the author of the popular book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.

Wolf’s 2018 book, Reader, Come Home, is her attempt to evaluate the impact of short-form media and our immediate access to information via the internet on the development of deep, critical thinking processes—and, perhaps more specifically, our capacity to transition between short-form processing to long-form processing and subsequent loss of long-form, deep reading neural pathways. She posits that information must be converted into knowledge, which then evolves into wisdom, and that short-form media and immediate access to non-contextual information short-stops this process, potentially leading our culture to offload the hard work of deep thinking to our (potentially ill-informed) leaders or, even worse, artificial intelligence.

This is frankly a terrifying read, mostly because I can verify that Wolf’s hypothesis is at work in my own cognitive processes. Over the past three years, I’ve attempted to read To the Lighthouse (Woolf), Middlemarch (Eliot), The Left Hand of Darkness (Le Guin), Lord of the Flies (Golding), and Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury), The Brothers Karamazov (Dostoyevsky), and given up each time the text did not immediately grab my attention. Each time, I blamed the author or the book, pointed a finger at the text for my failure, even though Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is perhaps one of my favorite memoirs of all time, and I have profound faith in Woolf as a writer/philosopher/feminist. How could I betray her like that? Before social media, I had no difficulty immersing myself into and digesting works like Anna Karenina, Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, The Lord of the Rings, Villette, literally all of Jane Austen’s books, and others. I used to get so involved in characters that I could not put my books down. I even pursued a master’s in literature to justify reading more books. Now I have to set myself a goal of 20 pages before I’m allowed to switch to another task, and I absolutely must place my iPhone in a space far enough away from me that I cannot reach it without getting up, preferably far enough away that I cannot hear it vibrate.

Perhaps all of this is even more convincing and terrifying when Wolf turns her focus to our children—a topic far, far too close to home for me. As far as I can tell, most of their time my children spend online, they consume media from YouTube, Instagram, and other sites popular with Gen Z. They do this for hours each day, and I’m terrified: will either of them develop or maintain the focus and deep attention necessary to complete the long-form tasks that lead to wisdom and progress humanity? Further, what values on this front will they instill in their own children? The problem is that they’re both adults now; I can no longer inform or regulate their access to short-form media. It is no longer my decision, my obligation, my role.

I must change the subject. This trajectory is too bleak.

One hypothesis that Wolf researched struck me as delightful: she determined that it does, in fact, matter whether we read on a digital device (Kindle, Nook, iPad) versus a physical book. Her perspective is also clear about audiobooks: they do not develop the same neural pathways for deep cognition as physical reading does. Her theory here is so fascinating. She talks about how books, as a physical entity, set us in a specific place and time as we read, which gives our brains context for the information it is processing. This is not only a physical location in the book, as in which page—toward the beginning, middle or end—but also a physical location in space, like where we were when we read it, how old we were when we read it. In her evidence, Wolf writes about a study where students who listened to an audiobook were less able to accurately recite the chronological events of a story’s plot because they had no reference to its location in the physical book.

This, to me, is akin to the analog versus digital clock theory. An analog clock keeps a physical record of the passage of time. The second and minute hands have physically moved in a traceable path. When the clock’s battery stops, we know at what precise time it did so. If all the world’s analog clocks just simply ceased keeping time, all at once, we’d know when, precisely, it happened. Essentially, the clock is telling a story. You’re tracking my logic here, I’m sure. This is not the case for a digital clock. There is no physical record or memory of time’s passage with a digital clock. If its battery stops, it simply goes blank, containing no information whatsoever (unless, perhaps, it has a backup battery, which my alarm clock does). Somehow, for this reason, my mind prefers analog time, and we have many, many analog clocks in my home. I can’t explain it, except that it feels something akin to credibility, reliability, or trust. It feels true.

My husband, Brian, also correlated Wolf’s theory to one of his own, regarding music and running outdoors. He explained to me that there are certain songs he used to listen to while running on his lunch breaks while he worked at the Pentagon, whereby if he hears those songs today, he can immediately envision the places he once ran: Pentagon City, Arlington, the Potomac, Alexandria. This has nothing to do with reading per se, but everything to do with the physical act of running through those spaces while listening to music. He says he never has the same experience if he’s running on the treadmill; likewise with audiobooks or eBooks. The neural pathways that develop when we engage in a cognitive activity that exists in time and space are more complex and tend to endure.

Wolf also talks about how this means we will have a different experience each time we read the same novel over again, since we are a different person with different lived experiences, in a different time and place, each time we experience that novel’s characters and world. Obviously, this is true, as I’ve experienced via my multiple readings of Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, Sense and Sensibility, Wicked, The Awakening, and LoTR (among others).

Of course, Wolf’s primary appeal for children ages 0-5 is simply that parents prioritize reading physical books with them—you know, the in-the-lap or bedtime story bit. But then, toward the end of her book, Wolf suggests some options for instructing digital literacy between the ages of 5-10 with which I categorically disagree. Wolf suggests a few ways we can introduce children ages 5-10 to digital media that don’t foster shortened attention-spans, including engaging them in projects like robotics and coding (which she rightly proposes is a second language). I do not think this will work. Maybe she’s a bit older than me. Maybe she never had kids in a digital age, the way Brian and I did. But we registered our kids for STEM camps at various times before 5^th grade, camps in robotics, coding, etc., and our kids hated them. In fact, if my memory doesn’t fail me, I think one or the other of my children might have quit their coding camp because they had such a distaste for it.

We cannot force an interest in the more technical, engineering, coding aspects of digital technology. These are by no means equivalent to reading, where children can immerse themselves in whatever topic they fancy, any topic of their choice. There is zero chance children will stick with these lessons in digital literacy if we spoon-feed them like broccoli or brussels sprouts, not even if we cover them in gooey cheese first by making them seem fun. Besides, Wolf’s research and her book arrived in the world just a shade before Tristan Harris’s documentary, The Social Dilemma. As such, Wolf seems utterly, blissfully oblivious to the engineered addictiveness of short-form digital media.

No; I think Wolf gets it all wrong, here. We shouldn’t be introducing kiddos to the digital world until they have already developed the circuitry for long-form deep reading. Maybe we can teach them, sometime in late middle school, to safely browse the internet, conduct effective searches for information, evaluate sources for credibility, and begin to inform them of the ways the internet uses our data and tracks our interests to inform algorithms, in a manner of digital literacy. But at this moment, I think the better solution is to ban social media for all children under the age of 16, as some other countries have done. And I think, further, that if I could go back, I’d turn off the WIFI router in my home at 8pm every night, despite my children’s protestations. Children simply do not need, for the benefit of their cognitive development, the 24/7 access they currently have to the internet and social media. I wish, further, that our government would regulate our children’s access to these things before age 16.

Hah—this reminds me of something I heard recently. It might’ve been Tristan Harris, but I can’t recall. Someone talked about how there was initially a race between the US and China to see who could first develop the ideal social media product. The US won that race and in winning it, lost more than we gained: we lost our children. This now is, in my perspective, equally applicable to the race for AGI, a race toward our own extinction.

But I digress, and I’m sure I’ve rambled far too long now.

Let me close with this thought: our children will not be able to critically evaluate the information they encounter on screens without first developing confidence in their own cognitive abilities, and Wolf posits that this confidence stems explicitly from deep reading. Honestly, Wolf’s perspective could never be more important than it is in this moment, as not just our children, but we ourselves face the challenges imposed upon our neural pathways by social media and AI.

And I know that for myself, I will be returning to my books. Wolf tested and proved that what neural pathways are altered or lost in the mind’s transition to short-form media can be retrained and regained if we simply “come home” to our physical books. This, therefore, is my plan. I’ve deleted all social media from my iPhone and begun to always carry a book with me in my handbag. Not to push too hard too fast, I will abide by my 20-pages-per-day rule until I find myself getting sucked back into this long-form medium. And indeed, it is already working, as in the past two weeks there have been at least three days where I’ve relinquished my afternoons and consumed over 100 pages in a sitting.

I’ll admit it freely and with joy: nothing feels better than coming home.