An Interview with Dr Maryanne Wolf

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I came back to the mainland and almost immediately went into a program that prepared me to switch
completely. The following year I went to Harvard to the reading laboratory and I just was determined from that
moment on that I was going to use my life to help kids through learning how to read. That was my vehicle to
ensure that they're going to at least have a shot at their potential. That that [reading failure] was not going to
hold them back.
That experience at Harvard's reading lab introduced me to all kinds of different approaches to the problem. I
had been thinking about it, more or less, from almost a sociological viewpoint. When I got to Harvard it was a
surprise to me. Here I am an English major and I became a scientist. I became totally involved in neuroscience
because it really seemed to me that we were going to get answers the likes of which we had never had before
in education from understanding what is going on in the reading brain. So, that became my quest, if you will, to
understand what it is the brain does when we read and how we can translate that knowledge, that
fundamental, theoretical knowledge into very practical applications in terms of diagnosis, assessment, and
most important to me, intervention.
So, twenty-plus years later I now have become very involved in the design and creation and testing through the
National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD)of the best forms of intervention for
different kinds of children with their different kinds of reading issues. It’s been a long journey and it’s been a
theoretically exciting one. I have to say, intellectually, I have never ever had one day of boredom. It’s made my
life very satisfied, if you will, in terms of feeling like everything I do and learn has something that makes the
lives of some kids better. It feels like a great way to live a life. So, that's my story.
David Boulton: That’s a great story. Thank you for sharing it. I like how you connected the dots. Maybe it's not
surprising to you, but a lot of the people I talk with have had some experience in their life that brought home
the incredible importance of this in a way that highlights the social lack of understanding at the core of it.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf: Yeah. Well, mine began actually in the social political realm and then it just didn't let go of
me. At that moment I so wanted to study poetry. Instead, I became a scholar who knows what happens when a
poet retrieves a word. It's still intellectually a lot of fun but it is very different from where I began.
History of Reading Disabilities and Dyslexia:
David Boulton: So, what would you say are the most important findings or the most important things that have
come out of your research into the neuroscience of reading that are not generally well understood?
Dr. Maryanne Wolf: The history of reading disabilities, (I'll use the word dyslexia - some people use it, some
people don't), is such a fascinating one because it's like a case study in science patterns, the desire for
parsimony among scientists and the refusal of the human brain to be typed in one way. What you see in this
history is one researcher after another seizing on what is in front of them and saying, "Ah, that's what dyslexia
is. That's what causes it." And it's really the most over-worked and even platitudinous analogy in the world. But
the blind men and the elephant describe the history of dyslexia research. The Blind Men and the Elephant: In
various versions of the tale, a group of blind men (or men in the dark) touch an elephant to learn what it is like.
Each one feels a different part, but only one part, such as the side or the tusk. They then compare notes and
learn that they are in complete disagreement.
David Boulton: And the Sufi key Story.
Dr. Maryanne Wolf: Exactly. If you look and put together even only the names of dyslexia, you'll see one
hypothesis is visual, one is memory, one is verbal, one is auditory. You just go down the list. Well, if you put
them all together, or if, as I'm doing this in a book now, I just put those names on the brain and you see a crude
cartography of reading. In other words, if it can go wrong it does. And at one point in the history of dyslexia