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

by Maryanne Wolf

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 human brain has to do to read, and of its clever ways of adapting when things go wrong, is analogous to the study of the squid in earlier neuroscience.