Brain Development Quotes

“Before two years of age, human interaction and physical interaction with books and print are the best entry into the world of oral and written language and internalized knowledge, the building blocks of the later reading circuit.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“...before most of us possess an inkling that babies could be listening to us, infants are making astonishing connections between listening to human voices and developing their language system.

Think how much more can happen in those regions when parents slowly, deliberately read to their children, *just to them*, with mutually focused attention. This disarmingly simple act makes huge contributions: it provides not only the most palpable associations with reading, but also a time when parent and child are together in a timeless interaction that involves shared attention; learning about words, sentences, and concepts; and even learning what a book is. One of the most salient influences on young children's attention involves the shared gaze that occurs and develops while parents read to them. With little conscious effort children learn to focus their visual attention on what their parent or caretaker is looking at without losing an ounce of their own curiosity and exploratory behaviors. As the philosopher Charles Taylor notes, "The crucial condition for human language learning is *joint* attention," which he and others who are involved in studying the ontogenesis of language consider one of the most important features of human evolution.”
― Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World

“Too many of the teenagers I encounter in my practice and across the country are late in developing what it will take to function as an adult and create adult relationships: agency, independence, intimacy, fortitude, and self-reliance. Often it's because their community (not just parents but also peers, teachers, and extended family) is focused exclusively on the high-school paper chase and fails to encourage these qualities. I try desperately to convince these teens and their parents that delaying the emotional work of adolescence is dangerous.

"We're discovering that the brain during adolescence is very malleable, very plastic," Steinberg says. "It has a heightened capacity to change in response to experience. That cuts both ways: On the one hand it means that the brain is especially susceptible to toxic experiences that can harm it, but it also means that the brain is susceptible to positive influences that can promote growth. That's an opportunity we're squandering.”
― Madeline Levine, Ready or Not: Preparing Our Kids to Thrive in an Uncertain and Rapidly Changing World

“Based on the way that human brains develop, I think that people of my generation and younger are biologically different from people who did not hit adolescence with full access to the internet. It physically changes you, what you do at that period of your life.”
― c Boucher (Grimes)

“After leaving home, people become closer to who they really are.”
― Avi Tuschman, Our Political Nature: The Evolutionary Origins of What Divides Us

“Vegetables with limbs (Sonnet 2824)

Now more than ever, if the human race
stops doing art, writing literature,
writing philosophy, poetry, code,
writing songs, music and mathematics, because
apparently generative ai can do all of that,
soon indistinguishable from the human article,

then this is the exact moment in history
when the human brain, particularly
the prefrontal cortex, starts to shrink,
rendering our species into vegetable with limbs.

Generative AI is going to have
the biggest impact on brain evolution,
since primitive humans learnt
to harness fire, for better or worse.

I'm not asking you to avoid ai altogether,
even if you try you cannot, any more than
you can refuse internet or electricity,
because, more and more, ai is going to infiltrate
every aspect of the global tech infrastructure -

all I'm saying is, get your priorities straight,
no matter what you do in any other aspect of life,
keep the central art of your life untouched by ai,
use ai as assistant, not as ghostwriter.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Tierra Carta: Naskar Charter of Earth