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

by Maryanne Wolf

In the evolution of our brain’s capacity to learn, the act of reading is not natural, with consequences both marvelous and tragic for many people, particularly children.

Learning involves the nurturing of nature. —JOSEPH LEDOUX

WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ.

Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history; the ability to record history is one of its consequences.

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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 ...

and the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from thes...

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.

Biologically and intellectually, reading allows the species to go “beyond the information given” to create endless thoughts most beautiful and wonderful.

We must not lose this essential quality in our present moment of historical transition to new ways of acquiring, processing, and comprehending information.

the goal of reading is to go beyond the author’s ideas to thoughts that are increasingly autonomous, transformative, and ultimately independent of the written text.

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.

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.

Steven Pinker eloquently remarked, “Children are wired for sound, but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.”

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.

First came a new form of symbolic representation, one level of abstraction more than earlier drawings:

With the second breakthrough came the insight that 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 third epiphany, 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 physically signify each of these sounds for every word.

With each of the new writing systems, with their different and increasingly sophisticated demands, the brain’s circuitry rearranged itself, causing our repertoire of intellectual capacities to grow and change in great, wonderful leaps of thought.

To “read” a symbol demanded two sets of novel connections: one cognitive-linguistic and the other cerebral.

Located at the juncture of the three posterior lobes of the brain, the angular gyrus area, described as the “association area of the association areas”

Symbols rapidly became less pictographic and more logographic and abstract.

A logographic writing system directly conveys the concepts in the oral language, rather than the sounds in the words.

A network of processes went to work: the visual and visual association areas responded to visual patterns

frontal, temporal, and parietal areas provided information about the smallest sounds in words, called phonemes;

and finally areas in the temporal and parietal lobes processed meanings, functions, and conne...

Unlike other writing systems (such as alphabets), Sumerian and Chinese show considerable involvement of the right hemisphere areas, known to contribute to the many spatial analysis requirements in logographic symbols and also to more global types of processing.

logographic systems appear to activate very distinctive parts of the frontal and temporal areas, particularly regions involved in motoric memory skills.

We include Greek, Latin, French, Old English, and many other roots, at a cost known to every first- and second-grader.

It is hardly a surprise that the Akkadian writing system, like the earlier Sumerian system, took between six and seven years to master.

Michael Coe in his book Breaking the Maya Code,

Beginning readers learn pinyin to help them grasp the concept of reading and writing, to prepare them conceptually for having to learn 2,000 characters by the fifth grade.

What Makes an Alphabet?

a limited number of letters or characters

a comprehensive set of characters capable of conveying the minimal sound units of the language,

a complete correspondence between each phoneme in the language and each ...

an alphabet as a system that uses the minimum of notations necessary to express a spoken language unambiguously to its native speakers.

What distinguished our ancestors in ancient Greece from us was the great value the Greeks placed on an oral culture and memory.

The Greek letters alpha and beta come from the Phoenician aleph and bet, other evidence of Phoenician roots.

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

In other words, not only are different pathways utilized by readers of Chinese and English, but different routes can be used within the same brain for reading different types of scripts.