Understand Folgen

Reading seems an unremarkable skill. After all, everyone can read. Even small children. When we say something is as “easy as ABC”, we mean it is very easy indeed. In fact, learning to read has dramatic and irreversible consequences for people and for societies. Learning to read permanently alters your brain. It changes the emotions you experience and the way you relate to others. When a society learns to read the consequences are dramatic: wars break out, revolutions erupt and new political systems spring into being. Reading made us who we are. For centuries people have been reading more and more. Recently the trend has gone into reverse. The number of people who pick up a book has been falling steadily for twenty years. Now half of adults no longer read regularly. How will this change us? Over three episodes, Times writer James Marriott explores how reading made us, and what might happen if we stop.In this first programme, James finds out how unnatural the process of reading is, and the complex alchemy our brains create to make words on the page make sense to us, and asks what we gain - and lose - when we learn to read.Guests include:- Professor Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at UCLA - John Burn-Murdoch, chief data reporter for the Financial Times - Naomi Alderman, writer and presenter - Dr Joseph Henrich, Professor of Anthropology at Harvard UniversityProducer - Beth Sagar-Fenton Editor - Chris Ledgard

The story of how reading made us and what might happen if we stop - with James Marriott.

As James Naughtie concludes his series about the ideas tying America's birth 250 years ago to the United States today, he examines freedom, asking whose freedom, and what kind?He begins in Gettysburg, attending a re-enactment on the battlefield made famous by an address from President Abraham Lincoln in which he asked whether the United States "could long endure". That question is being asked again now, as Americans experience profound disagreements over many of the ideas in this series - economic opportunity, justice, freedom; even what it means to be an American. As he hears, American history itself has become a battlefield. And so speaking to historians with different perspectives, and senior political leaders from both parties, James assesses how dangerous this moment is for United States.Producer: Giles Edwards