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

by Maryanne Wolf

When we see these same circles and lines and interpret them as meaningful symbols, however, we need new pathways. As Raichle’s work showed, the presence of real-word status and meaning doubles or triples the brain’s neuronal activity. Becoming familiar with the basic pathways used in a token-reading brain is an excellent foundation for understanding what happens in more complex reading brains. Our ancestors could read tokens because their brains were able to connect their basic visual regions to adjacent regions dedicated to more sophisticated visual and conceptual processing. These adjacent regions are found in other occipital and nearby temporal and parietal areas of the brain. The temporal lobes are involved in an impressive range of auditory and language-based processes, which contribute to our ability to comprehend the meanings of words. Similarly, the parietal lobes participate in a wide range of language-related processes, as well as spatial and computational functions.