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

by Maryanne Wolf

Dragon Bones, Turtle Shells, and Knots: The Curious Signs of Other Early Writing Systems

some records from Spanish historians in the sixteenth century described how the Incas told missionaries that entire cultures were recorded on them. (The missionaries promptly burned all the quipus they could find, to rid the Incas of their ties to past gods!)

THE BIRTH OF AN ALPHABET AND SOCRATES’ PROTESTS

What Makes an Alphabet?

THE MYSTERIOUS WRITINGS OF CRETE AND THE DARK AGES OF GREECE

THE “INVENTION” OF THE GREEK ALPHABET: DAUGHTER OF THE PHOENICIANS OR SISTER?

Does an Alphabet Build a Different Brain?

CLAIM 1: THE ALPHABET IS MORE EFFICIENT THAN ALL OTHER WRITING SYSTEMS

CLAIM 2: THE ALPHABET STIMULATES NOVEL THOUGHT BEST

By taking a meta-view of this entire history, we can see that what promotes the development of intellectual thought in human history is not the first alphabet or even the best iteration of an alphabet but writing itself.

As humans learned to use written language more and more precisely to convey their thoughts, their capacity for abstract thought and novel ideas accelerated.

From a cognitive perspective, therefore, it is again not that the alphabet uniquely contributed to the production of novel thought, but rather that the increased efficiency brought about by alphabetic and syllabary systems made novel thought more possible for more people, and at an earlier stage of the novice reader’s development. This, then, marks the revolution in our intellectual history: the beginning democratization of the young reading brain. Within such a broadened context, there can be no surprise that one of the most profound and prolific periods of writing, art, philosophy, theater, and science in all of previously recorded history accompanied the spread of the Greek alphabet.

CLAIM 3: THE ALPHABET FACILITATES READING ACQUISITION THROUGH ENHANCED AWARENESS OF SPEECH

Socrates’ Protests, Plato’s Quiet Rebellion, and Aristotle’s Habit

SOCRATES’ FIRST OBJECTION: INFLEXIBILITY OF THE WRITTEN WORD

SOCRATES’ SECOND OBJECTION: MEMORY’S DESTRUCTION

SOCRATES’ THIRD OBJECTION: THE LOSS OF CONTROL OVER LANGUAGE

As Socrates put it, “Once a thing is put in writing, the composition, whatever it may be, drifts all over the place, getting into the hands not only of those who understand it, but equally of those who have no business with it; it doesn’t know how to address the right people, and not address the wrong. And when it is ill treated and unfairly abused it always needs its parents to come to its help, being unable to defend or help itself.”

Reading presented Socrates with a new version of Pandora’s box: once written language was released there could be no accounting for what would be written, who would read it, or how readers might interpret it.

Will modern curiosity be sated by the flood of pat, often superficial information on a screen, or will it lead to a desire for more in-depth knowledge? Can a deep examination of words, thoughts, reality, and virtue flourish in learning characterized by continuous partial attention and multitasking? Can the essence of a word, a thing, or a concept retain importance when so much learning occurs in thirty-second segments on a moving screen? Will children inured by ever more realistic images of the world around them have a less practiced imagination? Is the likelihood of assuming we understand the truth or reality of a thing even greater if we see it visually depicted in a photograph, film, or video or on “reality TV”?

How a child first learns to read is a tale of either magic and fairies or missed chances and unnecessary loss. These two scenarios tell of two very different childhoods—the first, in which almost everything we hope for occurs; and the second, in which few tales are told and little language is learned, and the child falls farther and farther behind before reading can even begin.

The First Story

SERIOUS WORDPLAY

LAUGHTER, TEARS, AND FRIENDS

Young children learn to experience new feelings through exposure to reading, which, in turn, prepares them to understand more complex emotions.

This period of childhood provides the foundation for one of the most important social, emotional, and cognitive skills a human being can learn: the ability to take on someone else’s perspective. Learning about the feelings of others is not simple for three-to five-year-olds.

We may never fly in a hot-air balloon, win a race with a hare, or dance with a prince until the stroke of midnight, but through stories in books we can learn what it feels like. In this process we step outside ourselves for ever-lengthening moments and begin to understand the “other,” which Marcel Proust wrote lies at the heart of communication through written language.

WHAT THE LANGUAGE OF BOOKS TEACHES US ALL

“The language of books” is a concept rarely articulated by children and, to be sure, little considered by most of us. In fact, several somewhat unusual and important conceptual and linguistic features accompany this language and contribute immeasurably to cognitive development.

First, and most obviously, the special vocabulary in books doesn’t appear in spoken language.

But it is not only vocabulary growth that is special about the language of story and books. Equally important is the syntax or grammatical structure found here, which is largely absent from the stuff of everyday speech.

Another feature of the language of books involves a beginning understanding of what might be called “literacy devices,” such as figurative language, particularly metaphor and simile.

In the process, they are gaining not only vocabulary skills, but also practice in the cognitively complex use of analogy. Analogical skills represent an extremely important, largely invisible aspect of intellectual development at every age.

Another contribution from the language of books involves higher-level understanding by the child.

Arguably, there are only several hundred different types of stories, with many variations across cultures and times. Children eventually develop an understanding of many of these distinct types, each of which has its own typical plot, setting, era, and set of characters.

This kind of cognitive information is part of what goes into “schemata,” a term some psychologists use to refer to how certain ways of thinking become routinized and help a person make sense of events and remember them better.

The principles here function in a self-reinforcing spiral: the more coherent the story is to the child, the more easily it is held in memory; the more easily remembered the story is, the more it will contribute to the child’s emerging schemata; and the more schemata a child develops, the more coherent other stories...

After considering the many ways that exposure to books helps children’s development of later reading, we might assume that just reading a great many books to your child is enough preparation in the preschool reading period. Not quite. According to some researchers, being read to is only part of what prepares children for reading. Another good predictor is the seemingly humble ability to name a letter.

WHAT’S IN A LETTER’S NAME?

As children gain familiarity with the language of books, they begin to develop a more subtle awareness of th...

Before they learn to recognize a letter automatically, much less label it, children have to make some of their neurons in the visual cortex “specialists” in detecting the tiny, unique set of features of each letter—exactly what the first token readers had to do.

Here, an important, early set of conceptual skills—pattern invariance—facilitates learning letters.

humans have innate abilities that permit us to store representations of perceptual patterns in our memory and then apply them to each new learning situation. From the start, therefore, children search for invariant features when they try to learn something new. This helps them build visual representations and rules that will eventually allow them to identify any letter on a refrigerator, regardless of size, color, or font.

Gradually, each child in most literate cultures begins to acquire a repertoire of frequently seen letters and words before ever learning to write these letters. This phase of reading is like a “logographic” stage in the child’s development: what the child understands, not unlike our token-reading ancestors, is the relationship between concept and written symbol.

WHEN SHOULD A YOUNG CHILD BEGIN TO READ?

across three different languages that European children who were asked to begin to learn to read at age five did less well than those who began to learn at age seven. What we conclude from this research is that the many efforts to teach a child to read before four or five years of age are biologically precipitate and potentially counterproductive for many children.

NOTES FROM THE GREAT UNMYELINATED

Many wonderful things can happen before age five that are developmentally appropriate and facilitate both later reading and enjoyment of preschool without explicit reading instruction.

Writing and listening to poetry, for example, sharpen a child’s developing ability to hear (and ultimately to segment) the sma...

One of the more intriguing questions about children’s first writing is whether or not they can read it. In fact, most children are hard-pressed to read back what they have written, but oh, do they want to! This motivation, coupled with learning the individual sounds in words that goes into “invented spelling,” makes children’s early writing an extremely useful precursor of learning to read, and a wonderful complement to the actual reading process.