Youre listening to Lifekit from NPR.
Hey, Im Andrew Limbong in for Mario Saguera.
In my usual gig at NPR, I host the book of the Day podcast and I report for our culture desk, mostly covering books and publishing.
So I do a lot of reading, which might sound like a dream to a lot of you, but let me let you in on a deep, dark secret.
I find reading extremely difficult.
Ever since I was a kid through college as a literature major, and especially now when every book I read is competing with my phone for my attention, it's always a fight to achieve that level of locked in, deep reading.
Turns out I was born this way and so were you.
We were never born to read.
And that means that human beings don't have, if you will, a place.
They don't have a genetic program for reading the way we do, for language and vision and even affect.
Everything has these genetic programs.
It's just not the way reading is because it's an invention.
It doesn't exist in our brain.
Rather, we have to learn it.
And that means our brain has to make a new circuit.
This is Marianne Wolf.
I'm the director of the center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and social justice at UCLA.
I'm the author of reader Come Home, the reading Brain in a digital world.
She's also the author of the book Proust and the the Story and science of the reading Brain.
So the perfect person to ask about deep reading.