Here’s what is bothering renowned cognitive neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf:

As people spend more and more time reading on screens, they’re skimming more and losing their aptitude for sustained, deep reading. They’re likely to stick with simpler, less cognitively challenging material, preferring the familiar to the informative. It’s a danger, Wolf says, to “the kind of democratic society whose base is the listening and the recognition of multiple voices and viewpoints.”

The director of UCLA’s new Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice, she has devoted her life to understanding how the human brain learns to read. She discusses her findings and concerns, which she has laid out in a trilogy of books culminating with the recently released Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World.

For presentation slides, click here.