 Harper Collins and Harper Audio present Reader Come Home, The Reading Brain in a Digital World by Mary Ann Wolfe. Read by Kirsten Potter. If we could modify the structure and wiring of the brain, that would be a fundamental game changer in terms of who we are, what we decide, what we think. We are in a different phase of evolution. The future of life is now in our hands. It is no longer just natural evolution, but human-driven evolution. Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullens. The question isn't what books will become in a world of electronic reading. The question is, what will become of the readers we've been? Marilyn Clinkenborg. Letter 1. Reading. The Canary in the Mind. Fielding calls out to you every few paragraphs as if to make sure you have not closed the book, and now I am summoning you up again, attentive ghost, dark, silent figure standing in the doorway of these words. Billy Collins. Dear Reader. You stand at the doorway of my words. Together, we stand at the threshold of galactic changes over the next few generations. These letters are my invitation to consider an improbable set of facts about reading and the reading brain whose implications will lead to significant cognitive changes in you, the next generation, and possibly our species. My letters are also an invitation to look at other changes, more subtle ones, and consider whether you have moved, unaware, away from the home that reading once was for you. For most of us, these changes have begun. Let's begin with a deceptively simple fact that has inspired my work on the reading brain over the last decade and move from there. Human beings were never born to read. The acquisition of literacy is one of the most important epigenetic achievements of Homo sapiens. To our knowledge, no other species ever acquired it. The act of learning to read added an entirely new circuit to our hominid brain's repertoire. The long developmental process of learning to read deeply and well changed the very structure of that circuit's connections, which rewired the brain, which transformed the nature of human thought. What we read, how we read, and why we read, change how we think, changes that are continuing now at a faster pace. In a span of only six millennia, reading became the transformative catalyst for intellectual development within individuals and within literate cultures.