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