“Human beings were never born to read,” observes Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Unlike the ability to understand and produce spoken language, which under normal circumstances will unfold according to a program dictated by our genes, the ability to read must be laboriously acquired by each individual. The “reading circuits” we build are recruited by brain structures that evolved for other purposes – and these circuits can be weak or robust, depending on how often and how vigorously we use