Focused - 196: Focus & The Reading Life, with Maryanne Wolf

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Welcome to the Focus Podcast, a productivity podcast about more than just cranking widgets. I'm David Sparks and joined by my co-host, Mr. Mike Schmitz. Hi, Mike. Hey, David. How's it going? It's going well, and I am super excited about today's show. We have a special guest on the show, Marianne Wolfe, or should I say Professor Marianne Wolfe. Welcome to the show, Marianne. Professor Marianne Wolfe, welcome to the show, Marianne. Thank you. It's a true pleasure. I have not heard this productivity explained or interpreted in such a myriad of ways.

So I'm very interested in this conversation myself. Well, you know, the real reason for the show is that the premise is that focus is the superpower of the next decades. And that in a world where we are constantly having our focus attacked, which is something you've written about, we're going to talk about. It's the goal these days should be learning how to focus. And if you can do that, the rest gets easy. And so much of productivity is about, well, how can you get more email done in the next hour or whatever? We don't talk about that. We like to talk about the big question of focus.

And as such, Mike and I read a lot of books. And we are both, I know I am a super fan of you, Marianne. Just to give the audience a little background, Marianne has a very interesting history. I'm going to have you tell us about it. But you're into literature, but you're also a cognitive scientist and it's such an interesting mix. And she's written some amazing books over the years. The first book I read of yours was Prowse and the Squid,

the story and science of reading the brain from 2007. And, and then I just recently read Reader Come Home, the reading brain in a Digital World, which is a 2018 book. But Marianne has written extensively about how our brains work when it comes to reading and why reading is so important. And frankly, you've talked about some of the concerns of the way the reading world has evolved. And I think this is a huge part of Focus. And thank you so much for coming on today. Thank you. It's my pleasure. I'm going to learn from you, and I hope it's obviously a reciprocal dialogue. Yeah. Well, I'm so happy to share your story and your knowledge with the audience. But could you just tell us a little bit about your story and how you went on this path?

But could you just tell us a little bit about your story, how you went on this path? I know that Mike is in the middle of the Midwest winter. As we're recording, Mike is in negative 30 degrees. So we're hoping his connection sticks around, but we'll see. But I totally understand those winters, Mike. Whether I was in the Midwest, which I grew up in, or in Boston, where I spent most of my life until I came to UCLA more recently. But the real story that I think that David is hinting at is that there are three major almost epiphanies that I have had along the way that changed me into the person who is something of a reading warrior or deep reading in the species, but especially the young. And it begins actually

in the Midwest, Mike, where I grew up in a very small town, just prototypical. Everyone knew everyone, but I especially knew the librarian. And I was introduced both through my tiny little school, basically to the world of books. And when you live in a small town, and I was very happy where I was, I still had the desire to go and be in all these amazing places that I learned about through books. And so it was almost like Emily Dickinson saying that reading or books are her frigate. Well, they were my bridge. They were my ship. They were my train. They were my jet to visit not just other places, but other times. The emotions of people. So I was something of a precocious student in a classroom with four grades in it.

So in second grade to squelch my desire to talk to everybody and distract everyone. My parents who were not well off then nevertheless gave an entire library of books for the back of the room. And so I read basically the great books as a very young person for many years. And they and the librarian, her name was Frances Menzi, they were my ticket to being a person who had a sense of the world when it seemed as remote as could be from this tiny little town in Illinois. Then I went on to college and graduate school and everything that I could do in literature, but also psychology, I did. And I was, I guess, a little precocious in college too. They gave me free reign. This was at St. Mary's and Notre Dame. And they said, basically, I could take anything I wanted.

And I did. And so I really began to pair literature and psychology there, but also philosophy and theology. And I really wanted to understand knowledge. So I did a master's in Rilke, the poet that I thought I would always teach. And then here's my second epiphany. I went on a Peace Corps-like stint to what should have been a Native American reservation. They couldn't take us. They didn't even have money for food for us. And they put us in rural Hawaii.

And it was there, unexpectedly, that I began to understand literacy in a totally different way, a political way, if you will, because all my children, if I could not teach them to read, were going to become the indentured servants that their parents were in the plantations. And so it was a riveting experience. And Mike, I don't know if this is what you really wanted me to say, but that changed my life. I realized that literacy was so much more than the beauty and the enjoyment that I had experienced all those years, but rather one of the most important vehicles for the potential development of a child. So I ended up at Harvard Reading Lab, and I was absolutely, it was like a child in a candy shop. Absolutely. It was like a child in a candy shop. A whole new knowledge base became available to neuroscience. It's so much larger than that. But I realized that if I'm going to help

literacy in a very serious way, I had to understand the brain. And so I became what is now called a cognitive neuroscientist, in which I study how the brain develops reading so that we can teach its part. And that really is counter to what happened in the United States, where people were so divided about how to teach reading. And for me, the reading brain teaches us that those methods that are still unfortunately too divided, phonics, what's called balanced or even whole language, that we need systematic attention to all the parts of the reading brain, leaving no teacher's expertise out, but expanding the knowledge of every teacher. So I came to California from Tufts and am working at every possible level, the state level, the local level, the national level.

And we have worked in Ethiopia and South Africa and Italy and Australia. And we're always working on one thing. How can we take this group of children and maximize their potential? So reading for me is the potential to thought. Thought is the potential to the development of the individual, the development of the individual changes society. And these changes will affect not only democracy, which seems like a huge leap for a cognitive neuroscientist, but it will affect the species too, which returns us, David, to your question about focus and attention. Because all of this is about how the species can develop all these wonderful inventions, which require different uses of circuitry

and ascend and not regress and lose some of their sophisticated circuitry. So it does all go back to your focus on what I call attention. Yeah. I mean, I feel like our brains are a lot closer to the person running away from a saber-toothed tiger than they are to someone mastering an iPad. But that's something I want to hear from you because you, like I said, it's just such a fascinating story of you grew up and just your education was around literature, but you added cognitive science to it. And it's like such an interesting combination. And I was wondering if you could maybe just start talking to us a little bit about the science of reading and how that works. The best way to think about it begins with my first line in Proust and the Square, the story and science of the reading brain.

Because that little sentence is absolutely epiphanous, if you will. And that is, we were never born to read. There's nothing, absolutely nothing in the brain that says, put me in an environment I will learn to read. That's what we have with vision and language and all these beautiful capacities we have. They just have a genetic program and they unfold. Not so with reading. Yeah, there's no built-in software to read a book. No software, no software. What it does have, though, and that's a magnificent, even I sometimes use the word

miraculous and I mean it. It is a miraculous design principle that our brain can take its older parts that are genetically programmed and make new connections to make the basis for a new invention, whether it's literacy or numeracy or all the capacities that the digital culture is inviting us to learn. So we really have this design principle that says, when faced with this new invention, you can't adapt this set of circuits in a new way. So what we have in zero to five are all these parts of a circuit developing. Now, I say that because I need people to know that reading has these precursors that society has to do a better job of ensuring develop.

We need language and cognitive and background knowledge in these zero to five kids. And so I work with people like the Canadian children's, I work with a lot of people on zero to five, making sure our youngest children have all these parts developed. But our job next at five is to help the brain connect the parts. Now the parts include, and this is where it goes straight to your focus, so to speak, the parts require us using the attentional systems. There's different attentional systems, but we have to train the attention to say to the visual system,

to say to the visual system, heed this letter, heed this pattern, and connect it to the sounds. Now, I'm only going to talk about alphabetic systems, Chinese and Japanese kanji. Each writing system has its own requirements. Some are shared, some aren't. In Chinese, we have a slightly different set of connections, same way with kanji in Japanese. But we won't talk about that. We'll just talk about a basic alphabet. The brain's visual system has to connect with a cognitive principle. This is what people don't even think about,

that it took us thousands of years to figure out the alphabetic principle. And we give the kids just a couple thousand days to get a cognitive principle that words are composed of little bits of sound, linguistically phonemes, and that those sounds are represented by a visual letter, a symbol. Now, all this really takes a lot of cognitive skill that the child is learning. They are learning. The problem with some of the work in the United States is the assumption that reading is natural and that children will

induce the alphabetic principle. Well, that's true for a fair amount of kids. They will with practice or exposure, they'll induce it. But that leaves maybe 40%, depending on the school or the background, 40 to 60% of our kids have no ability to do that. They need us. That's where the New York Times and so many people have been, you know, working so hard to bring phonics. Well, I'm just going to say phonics is really a wonderful vehicle for teaching the kids the alphabetic principle. But it's not enough. And that's where I'll step on a thousand toes of anybody listening. The brain has to connect the visual system to not only the phoneme system, phonological system, but the semantic system, what words mean, the syntactic

system, how we use words in different ways in sentences and stories and text. There are many more things that we connected to, but I'll stop here by saying also the affective system. Once you learn what words mean, they begin to inspire feelings. They activate whole parts of the brain that are, I'll just say, some of your listeners will know what the amygdala or the thalamus or hippocampus are, but most won't. I'll just say underneath the second layer, if you will, is all of this stuff about how memory and affect are coming together. connected when that child learns how to read fast enough, what's called fluently enough or proficiently enough to get meaning. And then, okay, I'm going to end the story really fast because I'm probably exhausting the attention of your listeners. But if you built this basic decoding brain, you can then begin to elaborate it with all these beautiful cognitive processes that we have gained over the last 6,000 like perspective taking, things which I call critical analysis. We're after knowing how what we know matches what this new information is. And that just builds and builds and builds.

The great writer, reader, Alberto Mangel says that, you know, we expand like in geometric progression with everything we read. So this Mike is needing to expand with fiction some of his cognitive processes because he's been elaborating all of these nonfiction processes, which are beautiful. I mean, that's the stuff of what I write, but what I read informs what I write, Mike. Yep. Yeah. And so just for background, let me just say, you know, Mike, I think most listeners know Mike is a prolific reader, but he only reads nonfiction. And then last year on our challenge, I got him to read Douglas Adams, but I still didn't sell him on fiction. But halfway through reading your book, Marianne, I got the most beautiful text from Mike. Mike, what did you tell me? I said, I'm halfway through Reader Come Home, and I've decided to start reading fiction. We have moved the unmovable here.

But that's one of the messages in your book that I thought really come out. I've always thought about reading as the opportunity to stand in somebody's shoes, but the transfer of emotion that you explain, I think that's very powerful. Yes, I actually use a term that a mentor of mine, a theologian, John Dunn, used, which is called passing over.

Now, the more sophisticated term in cognitive neuroscience would be the perspective-taking capacity. And some of the neuroscientists are really exploring this, how what we read actually changes us because we take on not just the feelings, but the thoughts and the feelings of others. So whether it's fiction or nonfiction, we are leaving our limited perception of the world, our limited knowledge of the world, affective empathy processes. One's more cognitive. So that's the more Machiavellian passing perspective taking, learning the thoughts of others. But there is this affective kind of empathy where we experience for sometimes the first time what it feels like to be this other person, this other character, or this other whole population. And there's something that, But, you know, Diaz said that reading is the closest we ever get to telepathy.

And that's what it really is doing. It is giving us a telepathic transport, if you will, into the thoughts and feelings and perspective of others. Into the thoughts and feelings and perspective of others. And then going back to the passing over, we pass over, we experience, and we return. And when we return, we are changed. We are enriched. Sometimes we are enraged. But we are different because we've added to the cumulative repertoire of knowledge of others. In this amazing transformation of who we are to adding knowledge about who others are. And I'll end this response here by saying that

in the conversation that Barack Obama had with one of my absolute favorite novelists, Marilynne Robinson, he was saying how novels taught him more than anything about what is gray, that the world is not black and white, and that he really had the experience of others. And she said that the greatest threat to democracy was the sense that others are ominous or are enemies. And what I think is happening today is that people are, and I returned to your metaphor before about the saber-toothed tiger, we're returning to a form of cerebral tribalism. I've never used that term before, David, so you're inspiring me with your question. I've never used that term before, David, so you're inspiring me with your question.

But I think this cerebral tribalism is identifying other as what Marilyn Roberts has called ominous or the enemy instead of a perspective that we didn't have and that we are the better for knowing about whether or not we agree or not, that's part of the process too. The examination of another perspective requires us to actually analyze what it is that is truthful, what is confirming, what is something to be rejected or refuted, but it's a process. And I think we are in danger of losing that part of us because we're stuck on our own views and how they get confirmed by the choices we make in our information. Yeah, and that's where technology doesn't serve us well.

It both can serve us well and it can be a detriment. And it is like everything under the earth that our human beings created has the capacity for good and ill. human beings created has the capacity for good and ill. And how we use our inventions, how we use the invention of reading is what I'm, if you will, a worrier and a warrior about.

That's the thing that got me into reading fiction or making the decision anyways. I guess it's still too early to tell whether it's going to stick because the first fiction book I ordered just arrived today. What is it out of curiosity? I don't remember what it's called. It's the one that Jason Snell recommended

on a recent episode of Upgrade. And I just shared it with David, but I can't look at my phone because of the cell issues. It's called The Mountain and the Sea by Ray Naylor. There it is. Yep. Oh, I haven't read it. I will write it down. The Mountain and the Sea. Yep. Courtesy of Jason Snell. But the thing that got me convinced to read it was the empathy piece that you were kind of just talking about. I can see looking at the society that we have in the U.S. specifically, the us-against-them mentality.

And I have a background with a family business that my dad has a master's in assessment. So he's developed assessment skill building systems for emotional intelligence. And empathy has always been something, it's emotional intelligence skill that's been fascinating to me. And then when you talk about the three ring circus and under the big top and all these different parts of the brain that are activated when you're reading, and then specifically the empathy that gets built when you are reading fiction, that's the thing that pushed me over the edge. The exact example that you used, which is really powerful, and maybe you shared this somewhere else, but you told the story in letter three of Ernest Hemingway taking that bet that he could tell a story with only six words.

And this just floored me when I read it. Six words were, for sale, baby shoes, never worn. And I was like, wow, there is so much that's being said. It's such a small amount of words. Yeah. No, it's true. And I guess what I would say to you, Mike, is that just keep Keep experiencing books that you find somehow take you out of yourself, your beautiful scientific mind and exploring all this, the profundity of difference in our world. And I actually would ask you to think about reading someone like Marilynne Robinson. And the reason is because, and Barack Obama called her something like an ambassador of empathy, but you literally enter this tiny small town, Gilead, in the Midwest, and it will amaze you. And some people actually get mad at me because they said, what is this? There's no sex. There's no murder. There's no mystery. There is the great mystery of human relationship that she just is able to plumb and teach us what other people feel in such a way that we feel,

isn't it wonderful to be this complex human being with all those feelings? And so, I mean, she started out with this trilogy, Gilead, Home, and Lila, and then added a fourth called Jack. They are really amazing pieces of fiction for understanding empathy for others. I really, really recommend them. This episode of the Focus Podcast is brought to you by ZocDoc. Go to ZocDoc.com slash focus to find the right doctor right now. You shouldn't have to feel awkward talking to your doctor. The good news is ZocDoc is the place where you can find and book doctors

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free. Then find and book a top-rated doctor today. That's Z-O-C-D-O-C.com slash focused. That URL one last time, ZocDoc.com slash focused. And our thanks to ZocDoc for sponsoring the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. And we actually have a question for you in that regard. Dan McCann, who I met when he was teaching medieval literature at Oxford, is a listener to the show. And we mentioned, we told the listeners to check out Read or Come Home before we did our interview with you. And Dan wrote in about emotional challenging literature in medieval period versus current. So he had a question. I thought it was a good question, so I thought I'd share it. He says, what is the advantage of reading emotionally difficult, demanding literature is the advantage of reading emotionally

difficult, demanding literature to the development of the brain? The medieval people viewed it like a mental workout, sort of a gym for emotions that would train and develop them along one's ability to respond to real-world situations in a better world. But I'd be fascinated to hear what, if any, modern neurological research has to say about this. Fascinated to hear what, if any, modern neurological research has to say about this. There is interesting neuroscience on what happens when we read a passage that is not only emotionally challenging, but can be physically challenging. And what I mean by that, and I told you I'm actually writing stories for this RAVO intervention for children who are struggling, in which I actually use some of the neuroscience. Of course, it's a story for first and second graders, but it's about the fact that when we read, the little girl who's in a wheelchair says, when I read, I have wings for my mind. And when I read about someone jumping or running, I'm running too.

Well, the truth is that that is part of the neuroscience research that, and I use the, I guess Mike has read it more recently, but the example of Anna Karenina leaping, you know, with her red bag at the train station, leaping in front of the train. Well, we leap. Our motoric system is leaping. Well, analogically, we are in our affective system, we are despairing when she does that. So we are just, we're leaping with our motoric system, but we are also leaping with the despair that any of us, you know, and this is, there is a lot of individual variation. To the degree that we learn, and it is learning, to identify with these heroines and heroes, we are experiencing emotions that cumulative. And I love Professor McCann's statement, we are not just, it's exercising, but it's developing a repertoire, a feeling that allows us to be more empathic.

And here I will, Jane Smiley was, the novelist Smiley, was asked whether she thought the novel would die out. And she responded, it would not die, but it may well be sidelined, we will have leaders, leaders who do not read and who do not understand the lives of others. And it was like, oh, my God, it was almost prophetic to hear her say that or to read that she said that. So in answer to Professor McCann, yes, it is not dissimilar from what the medievalists thought, but the neuroscientists can show you that there is more activation in these different areas when we read. And that is not just a reason to read fiction or nonfiction. It's a reason to develop, in essence, your desire this tribalism to who we are and other as ominous.

And it's often because we don't know a thing and haven't tried to understand who others are. I actually want to say one thing that is going to be very, very, very strange to add. One of my most important students, Dr. Tommy Katsir, is the head of Saffron Institute for Brain and Education in Haifa in Israel. Haifa in Israel. What she is doing in this crisis right now is developing for the young and for the teachers of the young in Hebrew, English, and Arabic, a program called Islands of Understanding, in which she's hoping to help build empathy for others among the young of not just Haifa, but throughout Israel. And also, you know, we talked about it yesterday, Arabic children in different countries. So, you know, whether or not this will ever be successful, I'm going to try to fundraise at some level for trying to increase empathy in our young. I'm doing it in my program, and I hope to bring her program. We have to develop that in our young.

And so, Dr. McCann, Professor McCann, I urge you, and I've always felt this about medieval literature, to spread that information far and wide. I've always been a fan of how much more the medieval period can teach us than what people realize. Yeah, and you know, it's funny because I've always realized that I have a physiological reaction to fiction. You know, like my heart will race, I'll be very happy, I'll be sad, you know, and I read a lot of nonfiction as well. I don't have that similar reaction, but I'd never made the connection that it is the transfer of emotion and the empathy element that your book. So, so points out so eloquently. And by the way, can I just say, I love the structure of the book,

the way he wrote it as chapters to the reader. It was a very, very clever and enjoyable. Mike, but you had something you wanted to say. Yeah. A question about the empathy piece from reading fiction, because later on in the book, you talk about the different ways that we learn when we read

physical books versus digital books. I'm a big advocate of physical books, and I have this crazy method that I use for taking notes in those physical books. But I'm also, as I mentioned, background in the family business and with the background my dad did and all the research behind the products with emotional intelligence. I know with the populations that they worked with, which is primarily special education and at-risk students, that video modeling can be an effective tool to help teach these social emotional skills. So I'm kind of curious where the balance there is for you, and maybe specifically with kids, because you talk about that in the book, about how we can use these digital textbooks and they

can add these additional things. But where is the balance there for the best way, in your opinion, to develop these empathic skills in younger kids? I want to parse your beautiful questions because there's several embedded there. I am never, ever going to think that there is only one way that any individual best learns that's for everybody. There is a lot of individual variation. And I, in the development of my own work, my own program, it's hybrid. I streamline what the teacher has to do through digital means. I complement what goes on with digital games, but I teach through the printed word. They have books. They have what are called possum books, which is just sort of fun way of making sure that they have a physical book, that they are writing, that they are doing art, that they are using their skills, but with print. And that they read these stories in print, in little tiny chapter books. Why? Reading is already laborious for the young reader.

And what I want to do is a combination of helping them become more automatic. So I use practice on digital games sometimes, but I want them to think, to learn, to think about what they read and to learn strategies that will enhance their ultimate ability to read fast enough to think and feel. to think and feel. And even these little stories that I am writing or rewriting with my team are meant to give them a sense. And the printed page is something very solid for them. It doesn't, it's not evanescent. It doesn't disappear. It also doesn't give them the sense they have to get to the bottom and go on and go on. You know, my colleague, Naomi Barron, always says that the screen hastens us along. And I say, and print allows us to pause, allows us, and here's where the cognitive neuroscience comes in,

allows the eye to both go ahead, like just a few letters ahead, but also where it had not necessarily confirmed what went before, easily able, it's right there to go back and check. This process is called comprehension monitoring. And the digital screen disadvantages the reader for monitoring. It advantages it for skimming and getting a lot of information fast, but it disadvantages, especially the child, because the child has to learn these deeper, more time-consuming processes, how to get them connected. I give you a 101 on the reading brain circuit, but that 101 didn't say enough about how those connections take time to develop, takes years to develop, learning how to connect to our best thought and our best feeling.

So the printed work, the book, the physical book, not only for the child, but also for the adult, not only for the child, but also for the adult, gives us more opportunity to monitor how we're thinking and to give us not a, and in psychology, there's a term called set. That's a tendency. And the screen as the set towards finishing it. And we word spot and we browse and we do all this. Well, I don't want those bad habits to be learned from the start by our children. And so I have the concept in the book in three of those chapter letters about how we might develop a biliterate brain in which on the one hand, they're learning how to read and get deep reading for about 10 years with print. And then at the same time, they're learning how to use digital and all the amazing programming and coding skills that they need. So there's

parallel development. And then at a certain time, when the teacher feels that they are ready, they are going to be learning how to do deep reading on any medium. But with teachers prepared to understand the advantages and disadvantages of different mediums for individual children. This episode of the Focus podcast is brought to you by Indeed. Go to indeed.com slash focused and join more than 3.5 million businesses worldwide using Indeed to hire great talent fast. We're driven by the search for better, but when it comes to hiring, the best way to search for a candidate isn't to search at all. Don't search, match with Indeed. If you need to hire, you need Indeed. Indeed is your matching and hiring platform with over 350 million global monthly visitors

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You mentioned coding. That's something actually that we've tried to do with our kids. They've gone through this service called Bitsbox and they learn how to code. And we have this mantra in our house of create, not consume, because we want to teach them to use the digital tools to make something as opposed to just consuming something. And you kind of touched on this a little bit, but maybe we should dive deeper into this concept of what the screen pushes you towards, which is the hurry up and get this done, as opposed to the, I'll call it analog, the printed media where you are free to ruminate on things and you go at a slower pace, at the pace that you actually understand things. You mind talking a little bit more about that? Sure.

And that probably will be a segue, David, into what we might talk more about. But there's a lot of research now on attention, which is, again, the focus of your focus on focus. which is, again, the focus of your focus on focus. And the attention of our children has to be learned in a way that is developmentally appropriate. And what I, not that I sense, what I now know from all too much of the research that's going on, is that the kids are having their attention, especially when they're really young, constantly distracted, constantly moving to the next.

And you said this consuming, They are consuming and not creating. That brain is consuming and absorbing information, but it's not being as active in the same way as when they are either listening to the story, if they're zero to five, or reading the story themselves in a printed book. Now, I know after your break, we can get into some of the research on this, David. So what I will do is stop here and say that each medium has its advantages and disadvantages. The absorption of a surface level of information that the human being is bombarded with in this period of our development, this period of the species development is so demanding that it is a defense mechanism to skim on a digital screen. And all of us do it.

We have to do it for our jobs. The same time, I'm going to focus on the development of those deep reading skills in the child and the youth so that by the time they become adult, who has to do all this skimming, they will know what purpose they have for their reading and be able to choose which medium is most appropriate, what skills, what cerebral, what cognitive capacities this particular contract or poem is best served by. So we'll come back to it, but it's not either or. It's what purpose does this form of reading require if we are to give our best to it or it doesn't need our best? That's a good question because for me,

just to share more history of Mike and me, so Mike didn't read fiction until you came along. I went through law school 30 years ago and I carried 50 pounds of books in my bag. And eventually when the technology came around that I could put all my books on a little Kindle and carry it around. That was very attractive to me. I've probably read three or 400 books on a Kindle, but I have been thinking increasingly about going back to physical books. And Mike has been encouraging me to do that because that's been his preferred medium. And your book really, Marianne, really made me think about it, about that slowdown process. So I bought Reader Come Home as a physical book, and I bought a few more, and the collection is growing here on my desk.

But the thing I found is that going back to physical books and giving myself permission to scratch and write all over them, I have found that to be, in some ways, a superior reading experience. And it was something that I didn't expect. I think a lot of people listening are wondering, like, should they be reading on Kindle or physical book? Is there a difference that they should be aware of? And I think I'd like you to go a little deeper on what those differences are. I'm going to actually do something with your listener. They don't see the video, though. They won't see anything, but I just want to describe it. Now, here is, I brought you to one shelf, and then I want you to look, I think you might have heard the Ezra Klein interview.

And then I want you to look, I think you might have heard the Ezra Klein interview. Oh, yeah. And I talked about bookends and how I begin the day. Well, now you have the advantage of seeing. This is my morning selection. Wow. Wow. And just for people listening, it looks like about 40 books on her table there. And they all look interesting.

Got 40 books on her table there. And they all look interesting. And if you open any of them, you will, I just randomly, okay, here's a page. And you see, I have my own system of notation. And then I have absolutely at the end, just to preserve the most important pages that I absolutely must return to are that part of my, if you will, my own inadequate memory, it will cue me almost like a personal index to what I found most important in that book. And so for folks listening, she writes an index in the, is it the back or the front? I think it was the front you showed me, but she writes an index in the back of the book

with references to her favorite pages. Yeah. It's my own insight index, if you will. And then there are the, all the notes, just like Mike has his system, I have my system of what I do if there's one asterisk versus three. If you get three, I am really using it to change myself. And that's going into the index. Well, it makes me feel better about me writing all over your book. So I feel like I'm in a good company.

Nothing is more of a compliment to me than some of the times I have been in places and they bring this dog-eared note to the old book. I thought, oh, you never know when you write a book. You never know. And I have written a book that almost no one reads. And it was the precursor to Read or Come Home. And it was for Oxford Press. They wanted me to write a book, especially for people in literature, for their, what they call literary agenda series it's called tales of literacy based on canterbury tales each chapter and no one reads it you you don't know our listeners i've bet a few of them will well maybe professor mccann might be the only one since it really did use Canterbury tales as,

as the way each chapter had, you know, the, instead of the wife's tale, it had the linguist's tale, the neuroscientist's tale. So, but anyway, what I'm saying is when you know, a book is read, even if people completely disagree, book is read, even if people completely disagree, it's your own attempt not to be a teacher, but to give the journey that you've taken to get this knowledge base into the mind of another person. And that is a great gift. And just from my experience, like the Kindle system I was using, there's a great service you pay for. So when you highlight it on Kindle, it saves them for you.

And then it does a spaced repetition called ReadWise. You may be familiar with it. But what I found was going to physical books after spending decades reading digital books was the efficiency just went out the window, but I feel like the engagement went through the roof. And I guess the thing is you just decide what kind of book you're reading. Are you reading a book to get some slurp, some information out of it really fast? Are you reading a book to truly engage with it? And that to me is kind of the balancing point. Yeah, you're absolutely right. And I would just expand your point by saying there are many purposes for reading. And when I'm on a plane

that's taking me to Rome or Milano, by God, I have my Kindle with me. I have to. And the purpose of those books is to entertain me. And I wouldn't want, I would be embarrassed to death to have people look at some of the titles in my Kindle. Professor Marianne Wolfe is reading that. Exactly. And right next to it are really important books that I wanted to take with me, but because I couldn't. So that's also,

I have to always have certain books with me that I can't necessarily carry. So I have a balance. I have a book. I have physical books that I take with me on my vacations. And I have a Kindle for those that don't want anybody else to see. Admission, admission. admission admission i have a question about your uh reading system and actually let me just back up a little bit and um share i guess one of the biggest insights i got from mortimer adler's how to read a book are you familiar with that one of course of course i am yeah i figured you were and

his whole point which was really really a revelation to me, was you have to engage in a conversation with the author, figure out their arguments, and decide what of it you're going to apply for yourself, which is why I have this crazy, ridiculous system where I create these mind maps and I write down the things that are resonating with me. And I have this emoji system. So these different, you know, the light bulb is an inspiration. The key is a key idea. I've got action items from these quotes,

things like that. I'm curious what your system looks like because you talked about different levels of asterisks. And from the science perspective, what do you lose when you can't take those types of notes if you're going to use like highlighting in the kindle app like david is talking about sending it over to readwise you've got the highlights and basically that's it and you create different tags i guess and things like that but what is missing from a retention and like a true understanding perspective when

you do it that way and and how did you land on the system that you use? Okay. So I have to tell you, I have two systems. I have the system for what I would consider everyday reading. And my everyday reading begins in the morning with more philosophical, if you will, and only a few pages, only a few pages. But it's essential to me to center myself as a human. We're all called upon to do many, many, many different things during our days. And we forget who we are. We forget the beauty of nature. If you're spiritual and that's part of who I am, we forget our place in the universe and our hope and desire to make choices for the good of others, if at all possible. So all that happens when I read in the morning for 20 minutes, 30 minutes at the most. And then there's a reading that, Mike, you would find probably

similar to yours, but a little more, I guess you would say, comprehensive in nature. I have notebooks. I have notebooks upon notebooks upon notebooks. And when I read a research article, like for reader come home, if you look at the back of the book, which only some people do, it is a constellation of papers

that inspired me for a single sentence or a single paragraph or a section, just voluminous notes in the back to pursue if you're a scholar or a student and want to know where did this piece of information or where did this thought come from. And those notebooks are what I construct to make those notes in the back. Those notebooks have a praises of the article, the major points in the article that are essential. And then instead of your light bulb, I force myself to do what I consider the acme of reading, the Proustian element, if you will. And that is, after I have looked at their argument, looked at their facts, and then said, does this match what I know?

Or do I question it? Or does it inspire me to go beyond what they did? That's the Proustian element. He said the heart of reading is when we go beyond the wisdom of the author to discover our own. I always say that almost everything anyone asks me, because that's the acme. That's the heart. That's the real home. When I say reader, come home, most people don't know.

That's the real home. When I say reader come home, most people don't know. The real home is when you enter that space and it takes milliseconds, but it takes that space and I write what's in that space, if you will, what this makes me think. makes me think. And so in my notebooks, instead of the notes within the book, the notebooks force me. It's a process. If I'm going to write a book, I'm going to truly try to think about it in as careful a way as I can. I can't do that all the time, but those notebooks force me. It's a process of forcing me to go from fact to question to my own thoughts. And so my notebooks are not for everyone. They're really not for everyone. But they're for anyone who wants to write their own thoughts down,

whether it's for an essay or for a book of their own. Or, you know, for students, it's a process that I tell my students. It is not for everyone. And it's probably the least likely to be adopted by this society because it literally requires what is going missing in our digital skimming brain. So that's my antidote to myself. agency that I worked at before becoming a full-time independent creator because I wanted to better understand what was going on in the economy at large because that was going to affect our clients and ultimately affect us. So if you're someone who wants to understand where the trends are going,

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Business Review articles like this one is that there are summaries that I can download and also audio if I wanted to listen to the article instead of read it. So if you're someone who's looking to understand big ideas better and how they fit into the world at large, then you should check out Harvard Business Review. These folks are widely known as the leaders in business leadership information, and they have a lot of sources. Most people know about their flagship magazine, but they also have their website, hbr.org, and a podcast. So you'll have interesting articles for your downtime and a podcast to get you ready for work during your commute. And you'll learn practical advice that you need on the stuff that actually matters in business. Think leadership,

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of Harvard Business Review's content is available for free after signing up on their site, subscriptions to unlimited content start at only $10 a month. In my opinion, this is a bargain. So go to hbr.org slash subscriptions and enter the promo code focused F-O-C-U-S-E-D right now to take advantage of this great offer. Again, go to hbr.org slash subscriptions and enter the promo code focus to learn more about this great opportunity to help manage your career and business today. Our thanks to Harvard Business Review for their support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. support of the Focus podcast and all of RelayFM. Well, I think it's a bigger antidote than just yourself. I mean, one of the themes I get out of your books is that, you know, the state of reading is in flux right now. And, you know, it's not, technology is partly to blame, I would say. But

could you explain your argument on that a bit? I feel like it's an important point that people need to be aware of. So when I began to answer your question about what the reading brain is, I talked about this circuit. It's actually a circuit of circuits. So let's just say those circuits, when they're developed, they become ever more elaborated. They add many more cognitive, affective, even motoric processes. When we get this fully developed brain. It is a masterpiece of connectivity. Each time we read, we are making a, if we're reading deeply, we're adding to it. So this is cumulatively beautiful masterpiece. When we don't deep read, we, in a certain way, if you

follow this analogy of many circuits being elaborated on, we go into almost a regression back to the fastest, simplest circuit. It's not unlike the one we had as a child and that's why i keep go almost ominously thinking about your saber-toothed tiger human we we regress to this basic circuit now the regression can be in our own service. As I said, it's a defense mechanism. We can get a lot of information, but do we process that information with all that's available to us? We are going so much into a set of, whether we call it efficiency or just we are and you forgive this pause i want your readers literally to make a parenza their minds but there's an extremely interesting philosopher korean who lives in berlin teaches their name hanung-chul. And he writes that our society

has become so accelerated that we no longer have the same intervals between events. And we don't experience those events in the same way because we keep going from event to event to event, accelerated, accelerated, accelerated. The same thing by analogy is happening in the reading brain. We are given so much information that we move from bit to bit to bit without the Han, Jung, The Han-Yung-Chul interval. The interval that allows us to think more deeply. And in your own words, David, I will add the word, to be more immersed. You literally are more immersed when more of your brain is activated. You are experiencing more. And when we're skimming, we are skipping.

We are short-circuiting what is available to us in the service of getting it done and moving ever faster. And we have become, ironically, in the goal of efficiency, we have become inefficiently using all of what's available to us in the deep reading circuit. So skill is the enemy of deep reading. It's like neuroplasticity gone wrong, kind of, right? That's right. And it is neuroplasticity. We adapt.

We adapt to a lot, so we adapt to a medium. I read a lot of classics, and Aristotle's one of my favorites. And I always think of him talking about man as the rational animal, that our rationality is what makes us human. And then he talks in the ethics about how when someone gets angry or someone loses control of their rationality there, debase themselves, you know? And I do think that as we stop engaging, and you used the term deep reading in the interview today, but I think it's deep thoughts as well. That's very distinct.

Exactly. What deep reading creates is deep thoughts. But I feel like as we become a more shallow culture, we do have a fear of losing use of those rational facilities. And the less you use it, as you're saying, the more the brain adapts to not build it, right? There's two parts. You develop it or use it or lose it. And I'm not a pessimist by nature, so I always think, okay, what are the antidotes to atrophy?

And that was part of the nature of the book, too, is to look at my own atrophy and develop my own personal way of handling that. So the focus listeners have been along with us on this journey, Marianne, and maybe we've got them thinking about their ability to deep read. What steps would you take if someone's thinking about that to work on that muscle and build that neuroplasticity in a good way? Okay. that muscle and build that neuroplasticity in a good way. Okay. I experienced for myself what it means to become an absolutely, similar to everyone else, digital reader.

And I didn't know it. And here I am a scholar of reading and I write about all this. And here I am a scholar of reading and I write about all this and the changes in myself were imperceptible. So the first thing I want to say to the listener is that you may not know element of immersion that beautiful journey inside yourself where you become someone else you take on you pass over into other lives other thoughts and develop somehow your own thoughts, your own best thoughts, have you experienced a lessening, a diminution of that immersion yourself? If you have, then the first thing that I ask you is look at yourself. You know, physician, examine yourself. Reader, examine yourself. physician, examine yourself, reader, examine yourself. And what I had to do in my examination was to confront that the dominant reading that I did during the day was bleeding over into all my

reading. And I chose a book that I loved to go back to and just test myself. And I won't go into details. That's actually letter four in the book. But I realized that I had become just like everybody else that I thought trying to help. I was just like everybody else. And I had to form my own discipline. And that's when I ended up reading this book. It was a book by Herman Hesse that I had loved and that I could no longer tolerate the reading experience. It was just obnoxious to slow myself down so much and think about a bunch of monks going up and down stairs. No. Years ago, I understood what it felt like and I had lost it. So I disciplined myself for two weeks. I would only read 20 minutes a night at the pace the reading required. So I would suggest that you choose a book that you already

know. And just like Heraclitus says, you never step in the same river twice. You never step in the same book twice. You go back into that book and see if you, and remember it has to be one that you loved and which had given you some really powerful thoughts before. See if you can regain, reclaim the purpose of reading for yourself. It took me two weeks. Might take a person two days. Might take a person longer. But after that, and that's where I thought you might have, you know, I really, really

have what is called a bookend process for my days. And it begins with slowing, not slowing myself down about speed, giving myself time. And forget the word slow and speed. Give yourself intervals of time to think. Maybe it's only a paragraph. Maybe it's a page. Maybe it's a chapter. Doesn't matter. But something that will give you a sense that you are the smallest little ant in the world, but that you have a place in it and that you can give to that world. And once you do that, you step outside yourself too. And that's what reading helps.

Step outside yourself and read in the interval. Give yourself intervals. And then at the end of your day, you're going to have a wonderful dinner. You're going to be with your family or your friends, or you're going to watch streamings? And I love K-dramas. People think it's hysterical. I love the world of the imagination, whether it's film or music or dance or opera. Oh my gosh, the world of imagination. And then after that, okay, David, you're going to like this. Sometimes it's Montaigne. Sometimes it's Marcus Aurelius. Sometimes it's Lydia Smith.

Sometimes it's Joël Diker, the French novelist. You know, not a lot, but a little. So, you know, when I can do that, I can almost always begin my bookend. I can't always end it, but when I can, I sleep better. Well, I would add to your list, Epictetus. I'm on a kick for him lately. I feel like he's underrated. That's a very good, yeah. well professor marianne wolf uh you truly are a reading warrior and we really appreciate you coming on the show with us today and i do think this is a massive uh this is just an incredible way to increase your focus is to rediscover

reading deeply and if you're interested in professor uhfe's research, go to MarianneWolfe.com. She has all her books there, and you can kind of hear about it. And, you know, read a good book, everybody. I'll join your book club, Mike. At least in my mind. Stay well. Godspeed to everybody. And just read.

Read your best. Thank you so much. I appreciate your time. And like I said, I'm a big fan of what you're doing and I just hope the message gets out there. Everybody needs to hear this. I feel like we're fighting an uphill battle, but we're fighting, right? We are. I'm not going to stop. All right. Well, I'm so happy we're able to have Professor Marianne Wolf on. I think that her story really does tie into this idea of focus and deep reading is something I think we should all be thinking about. Very inspirational.

And I want to thank her for coming on. Once again, you can find her at MarianneWolf.com. Thank you to our sponsors today, ZocDoc, Indeed, and Harvard Business Review. We are the Focus Podcast you can find us at relay.fm slash focus and we'll see you next time