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

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Education, Social Sciences, Science, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 December 2025

⏱️ 43 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Maryanne Wolf is a UCLA professor and the renowned author of "Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain" and "Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World." She says deep reading makes you a better thinker, communicator, and citizen. But what happens if you lose the ability to read slowly, patiently, and critically? Is there anything you can do to get it back? Sponsored By: GoDaddy - Get a domain for pennies at godaddy.com/nbi The Next Big Idea Club - Get 20% a membership when you use code PODCAST at nextbigideaclub.com (This episode first aired in March 2023.)

Transcript

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0:00.0	I hope that you're having a beautiful holiday break that includes serene moments for doing old-fashioned things like reading.
0:10.3	A landmark study released in August revealed that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure almost every day has plummeted 43% since 2004.
0:25.6	Only one in six Americans today describe themselves as daily readers.
0:28.3	How much does this matter?
0:34.9	According to neuroscientist Marianne Wolfe, a leading expert on the reading brain, this is a big deal.
0:35.9	Literacy changes the circuit of the brain of an individual,
0:42.3	which collectively changes the way that society thinks,
0:49.3	which changes the way that society works in a democracy or a form of government.
0:57.9	So the question is, how will the human species learn to preserve its best processes of thinking.
1:13.2	This conversation with Marianne recorded in 2023 is one of our favorites internally.
1:19.3	She is just bursting with a contagious passion for the act of reading, a healthy contagion,
1:25.3	if there ever was one.
1:27.1	It's worth noting that reading physical books in our increasingly distracted digital age
1:33.3	is becoming an ever more radical act, or what the author David Eulen calls,
1:39.3	an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.
1:43.3	If that's true, then we at the Next Big Idea Club are a
1:45.8	kind of joyful dissident group. We'd love to invite you to join the revolution. You can learn more
1:52.4	at NextBigideaClub.com. Mary Ann Wolf, welcome to the next Big Idea podcast.
2:18.1	What a pleasure, Rufus, to be with you.
2:20.7	For all kinds of reasons, I look forward to this conversation and the directions you are going to guide us in.
2:28.8	I am so happy to be talking with you today.
2:31.2	I have been deep in your last two books, Proust and the
	...

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