Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

by Maryanne Wolf

Knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works. —TERRENCE DEACON

WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.

By coming to understand how reading evolved historically, how it is acquired by a child, and how it restructured its biological underpinnings in the brain, we can shed new light on our wondrous complexity as a literate species. This places in sharp relief what may happen next in the evolution of human intelligence, and the choices we might face in shaping that future.

This book consists of three areas of knowledge: the early history of how our species learned to read, from the time of the Sumerians to Socrates; the developmental life cycle of humans as they learn to read in ever more sophisticated ways over time; and the story and science of what happens when the brain can’t learn to read.

There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain’s astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain’s ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill.

Thus the reading brain is part of highly successful two-way dynamics. Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually.

much of how we think and what we think about is based on insights and associations generated from what we read.

These two dimensions of the reading brain’s development and evolution—the personal-intellectual and the biological—are rarely described together, but there are critical and wonderful lessons to be discovered in doing just that. In this book I use the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust as metaphor and the largely underappreciated squid as analogy for two very different aspects of reading.

Proust saw reading as a kind of intellectual “sanctuary,” where human beings have access to thousands of different realities they might never encounter or understand otherwise. Each of these new realities is capable of transforming readers’ intellectual lives without ever requiring them to leave the comfort of their armchairs.

Scientists in the 1950s used the long central axon of the shy but cunning squid to understand how neurons fire and transmit to each other, and in some cases to see how neurons repair and compensate when something goes awry. At a different level of study, cognitive neuroscientists today investigate how various cognitive (or mental) processes work in the brain. Within this research, the reading process offers an example par excellence of a recently acquired cultural invention that requires something new from existing structures in the brain. The study of what the huma...

While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. “Passing over,” a term used by the theologian John Dunne, describes the process through which reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person’s consciousness.

the brain doesn’t find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it. The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children.

Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts.

We bring our entire store of meanings to whatever we read—or not.

All human behaviors rest on layers on layers of teeming, underlying activity.

In other words, all human behaviors are based on multiple cognitive processes, which are based on the rapid integration of information from very specific neurological structures, which rely on billions of neurons capable of trillions of possible connections, which are programmed in large part by genes.

Unlike its component parts such as vision and speech, which are genetically organized, reading has no direct genetic program passing it on to future generations. Thus the next four layers involved must learn how to form the necessary pathways anew every time reading is acquired by an individual brain. This is part of what makes reading—and any cultural invention—different from other processes, and why it does not come as naturally to our children as vision or spoken language, which are preprogrammed.

When confronted, therefore, with the task of inventing functions like literacy and numeracy, our brain had at its disposal three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns in information; and the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these areas automatically. In one way or another, these three principles of brain organization are the foundation for all of reading’s evolution, development, and failure.

Visual cells possess the capacity to become highly specialized and highly specific, and to make new circuits among preexisting structures. This allows babies to come into the world with eyes that are almost ready to fire and that are exceptional examples of design and precision. Soon after birth, each neuron in the eye’s retina begins to correspond to a specific set of cells in the occipital lobes. Because of this design feature in our visual system, called retinotopic organization, every line, diagonal, circle, or arc seen by the retina in the eye activates a specific, specialized location in the occipital lobes in a split second

Reading is a neuronally and intellectually circuitous act, enriched as much by the unpredictable indirections of a reader’s inferences and thoughts, as by the direct message to the eye from the text.

To be sure, the relationship between readers and text differs across cultures and across history. Thousands of lives have been altered or lost depending on whether a sacred text like the Bible is read in a concrete, literal way or in a generative, interpretative way.

the generative capacity of reading parallels the fundamental plasticity in the circuit wiring of our brains: both permit us to go beyond the particulars of the given. The rich associations, inferences, and insights emerging from this capacity allow, and indeed invite, us to reach beyond the specific content of what we read to form new thoughts. In this sense reading both reflects and reenacts the brain’s capacity for cognitive breakthroughs.

We feel quite truly that our wisdom begins where that of the author ends, and we would like to have him give us answers, while all he can do is give us desires. And these desires he can arouse in us only by making us contemplate the supreme beauty which the last effort of his art has permitted him to reach. But by . . . a law which perhaps signifies that we can receive the truth from nobody, and that we must create it ourselves, that which is the end of their wisdom appears to us as but the beginning of ours.

From the child’s first, halting attempts to decipher letters, the experience of reading is not so much an end in itself as it is our best vehicle to a transformed mind, and, literally and figuratively, to a changed brain.

The goal of this book is to integrate these disciplines to present new perspectives on three aspects of written language: the evolution of the reading brain (how the human brain learned to read); its development (how the young brain learns to read and how reading changes us); and its variations (when the brain can’t learn to read).

How the Brain Learned to Read

At its root the alphabetic principle represents the profound insight that each word in spoken language consists of a finite group of individual sounds that can be represented by a finite group of individual letters.

How the Young Brain Learns to Read and How We Are Changed over the Life Span

Several thought-provoking links connect the history of writing in the species to the development of reading in the child.

The first is the fact that although it took our species roughly 2,000 years to make the cognitive breakthroughs necessary to learn to read with an alphabet, today our children have to reach th...

The second concerns the evolutionary and educational implications of having a “rearranged” brain for learning to read. If there are no genes specific only to reading, and if our brain has to connect older structures for vision and language to learn this...

As the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker eloquently remarked, “Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.” To acquire this unnatural process, children need instructional environments that support all the circuit parts that need bolting for the brain to read. Such a perspective departs from...

Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading.

A little-discussed class system invisibly divides our society, with those families that provide their children environments rich in oral and written language opportunities gradually set apart from those who do not, or cannot.

Children who begin kindergarten having heard and used thousands of words, whose meanings are already understood, classified, and stored away in their young brains, have the advantage on the playing field of education. Children who never have a story read to them, who never hear words that rhyme, who never imagine fighting with dragons or marrying a prince, have the odds overwhelmingly against them.

When the Brain Can’t Learn to Read

Knowledge about reading failure provides a different angle on this knowledge base, with some surprises for anyone who looks there. From the viewpoint of science, dyslexia is a bit like studying a young squid that can’t swim very fast. This squid’s different wiring can teach us both about what is necessary for swimming and about the unique gifts this squid must have to be able to survive and flourish without swimming like every other squid.

Recent advances in neuroimaging research begin to paint a different picture of the brain of a person with dyslexia that may have enormous implications for future research, and particularly for intervention. Understanding these advances can make the difference between having a huge number of our future citizens poised to contribute to society and having a huge number who cannot contribute what they could otherwise.

Is the most current imaging and genetic research giving us the outlines of a very unusual brain organization in some persons with dyslexia that may ultimately explain both their known weaknesses and our steadily growing understanding of their strengths?

Across every known system, writing began with a set of two or more epiphanies.

simple marked lines on clay tokens, stones, or turtle shells can represent either something concrete in the natural world, such as a sheep; or something abstract, such as a number or an answer from an oracle.

a system of symbols can be used to communicate across time and space, preserving the words and thoughts of an individual or an entire culture.

the most linguistically abstract, did not happen everywhere: sound-symbol correspondence represents the stunning realization that all words are actually composed of tiny individual sounds and that symbols can...

First, a Word about “Firsts”

The First Written Eureka: Symbolic Representation

By the mere fact of looking at these tablets, we have prolonged a memory from the beginning of our time, preserved a thought long after the thinker has stopped thinking, and made ourselves participants in an act of creation that remains open for as long as the incised images are seen, deciphered, read. —ALBERTO MANGUEL

From the Mouths of Kings and Queens: The Second Breakthrough into Cuneiform and Hieroglyphic Writing Systems

The Story within a Story: How Sumerians Taught their Children to Read

From Sumerian to Akkadian

Another “First”? The Invention of Hieroglyphic Writing