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

by Maryanne Wolf

THE FLUENT, FEELING BRAIN

As David Rose, a prominent translator of theoretical neuroscience into applied educational technology, puts it, the three major jobs of the reading brain are recognizing patterns, planning strategy, and feeling.

The Expert Reader

EVERY WORD HAS 500 MILLISECONDS OF FAME

First 0 to 100 Milliseconds: Turning Expert

Attention to ...

Between 50 and 150 Milliseconds: Recognizing a Letter and Changing a Brain

En gland

England

100 to 200 Milliseconds: Connecting Letters to Sounds and Orthography to Phonology

200 to 500 Milliseconds: Getting to All That We Know about a Word

SYNTACTIC AND MORPHOLOGICAL PROCESSES

HOW WHAT WE READ CHANGES US OVER TIME

Reading is experience. A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read. —JOSEPH EPSTEIN

For every thinking person each verse of each poet will show a new and different face every few years, will awaken a different resonance in him. . . . The great and mysterious thing about this reading experience is this: the more discriminatingly, the more sensitively, and the more associatively we learn to read, the more clearly we see every thought and every poem in its uniqueness, its individuality, in its precise limitations. —HERMANN HESSE

This explains how we can read the Bible, Middlemarch, or The Brothers Karamazov at ages seventeen, thirty-seven, fifty-seven, and seventy-seven and come away with an entirely new understanding each time.

WHEN the BRAIN CAN’T LEARN to READ

DYSLEXIA’S PUZZLE AND THE BRAIN’S DESIGN

An Elephantine History

Across all written languages, reading development involves: a rearrangement of older structures to make new learning circuits; a capacity for specialization in working groups of neurons within these structures for representing information; and automaticity—the capacity of these neuronal groups and learning circuits to retrieve and connect this information at nearly automatic rates.

a number of potential basic sources for dyslexia emerge: (1) a developmental, possibly genetic, flaw in the structures underlying language or vision (e.g., a failure of working groups to learn to specialize within those structures); (2) a problem in achieving automaticity—in retrieving representations within given specialized working groups, or in the connections among structures in the circuit, or both; (3) an impediment in the circuit connections between and among these structures; and (4) the rearrangement of a different circuit altogether from the conventional ones used for a particular writing system.

Some causes of reading problems will be found across all writing systems, and some may prove relatively ...

PRINCIPLE 1: A FLAW IN THE OLDER STRUCTURES

many of the collective hypothesized sources of dyslexia mirror the major component structures of the reading brain.

PRINCIPLE 2: A FAILURE TO ACHIEVE AUTOMATICITY

A second type of hypothesis highlights the failure to achieve automaticity, or sufficiently rapid rates of processing, within or among those structures. The underlying premise is that as a result of this failure—whether at the level of neurons or structural processes—the various parts in the read...

PRINCIPLE 3: AN IMPEDIMENT IN THE CIRCUIT CONNECTIONS AMONG THE STRUCTURES

PRINCIPLE 4: A DIFFERENT CIRCUIT FOR READING

An understanding of the principles of brain design in reading moves us away from any one-dimensional account of reading disabilities, however worthy, into a multidimensional view of reading disabilities. There are various possible causes of reading failure—with all the difficult implications this fact has for intervention.

THE UNWANTED PRINCIPLE: MULTIPLE STRUCTURES, MULTIPLE DEFICITS, AND MULTIPLE SUBTYPES

Legasthenie, Dyslexi, Dyslexie: The Many Faces of Dyslexia around the World

A Century’s Mystery

GENES, GIFTS, AND DYSLEXIA

am somehow less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops. —STEPHEN JAY GOULD

If some version of the emerging theories about reliance on the right hemisphere in dyslexia turns out to be true for some children, or for many, this could open up relatively unexplored avenues for teaching the differently organized brain, with its unique mix of strengths and challenges. Finally, all this research on children who learn to read in different ways becomes part of the great body of knowledge about how all of us learn to read.

CONCLUSIONS: FROM THE READING BRAIN TO “WHAT COMES NEXT”

In the clash between the conventions of the book and the protocols of the screen, the screen will prevail. On this screen, now visible to one billion people on earth, the technology of search will transform isolated books into the universal library of all human knowledge. —KEVIN KELLY

Reflections on Reading’s Evolution

Learning to read released the species from many of the former limitations of human memory. Suddenly our ancestors could access knowledge that would no longer need to be repeated over and over again, and that could expand greatly as a result.

Simultaneously, the capacity of literacy for rapid-fire performance released the individual reader not only from the restrictions of memory but from those of time. By its ability to become virtually automatic, literacy allowed the individual reader to give less time to initial decoding processes and to allocate more cognitive time and ultimately more cortical space to the deeper analysis of recorded thought. Developmental differences in the circuit systems between a beginning, decoding brain and a fully automatic, comprehending brain span the length and breadth of the brain’s two hemispheres. A system that can become streamlined through specialization and automaticity has more time to think. This is the miraculous gift of the reading brain.

Two decades ago, Ong asserted that the real issue in human intellectual evolution is not the set of skills advanced by one cultural mode of communication versus another, but the transformative changes bestowed on humans steeped in both. In a prescient passage, Ong wrote: The interaction between the orality that all human beings are born into and the technology of writing, which no one is born into, touches the depths of the psyche. It is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness with articulate language, that first divides subject and predicate and then relates them to one another, and that ties human beings to one another in society. Writing introduces division and alienation, but a higher unity as well. It intensifies the sense of self and fosters more conscious interaction between persons. Writing is consciousness-raising.

Reflections on the “Natural History” of Reading

Each brain of each ancestral reader had to learn to connect multiple regions in order to read symbolic characters. Each child today must do the same. Young novice readers around the globe must learn how to link up all the perceptual, cognitive, linguistic, and motor systems necessary to read. These systems, in turn, depend on utilizing older brain structures, whose specialized regions need to be adapted, pressed into service, and practiced until they are automatic.

As we recognize the neuronal high-wire act that the young brain has to accomplish to acquire reading, we as a society can begin to teach individual children. Some children need more help than others with one or more of the parts of reading. The more we learn about those parts, the better able we will be to teach all children. Within such a perspective there can be no one-size-fits-all instruction. Our expanding knowledge about the development of reading has the potential to contribute to two all-important goals: understanding the magnitude of the reading brain’s accomplishments, and improving the opportunities for every individual child in the next generation to learn to read.

The developmental transformations that mark the way to reading expertise begin in infancy, not in school. The amount of time the child spends listening to parents and other loved ones read continues to be one of the best predictors of later reading.

Reflections on Dyslexia and Thinking Outside the Box

Dyslexia, with its seemingly untidy mix of genetic talents and cultural weaknesses, exemplifies human diversity—with all the important gifts this diversity bestows on human culture. Picasso’s Guernica, Rodin’s Thinker, Gaudi’s La Pedrera, and Leonardo’s Last Supper are icons as real and as expressive of our intellectual evolution as any written text. That all these were created by individuals who more than likely were dyslexic is not coincidental.

Humans today do not need to be binary thinkers, and future generations certainly don’t. As an apt Viennese expression puts it, “If two choices appear before you, there’s usually a third.”

To the Reader: A Final Thought

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR