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

by Maryanne Wolf

I believe that reading, in its original essence, [is] that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude. —MARCEL PROUST

HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species.

As the author Joseph Epstein put it, “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. Each of these new realities is capable of transforming readers’ intellectual lives without ever requiring them to leave the comfort of their armchairs.

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.

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.

What is being lost and what is being gained for so many young people who have largely replaced books with the multidimensioned “continuous partial attention” culture of the Internet? What are the implications of seemingly limitless information for the evolution of the reading brain and for us as a species?

Decade after decade of research shows that the amount of time a child spends listening to parents and other loved ones read is a good predictor of the level of reading attained years later.

Until I feared I would lose it, I never loved to read. One does not love breathing.

Children often have a very hard time figuring out how to blend sounds together to make words like “cat” and “sat.” Knowing the linguistic principle that a “continuant” phoneme like “s” can be held on to as long as it takes for the child to add the rime (such as “at”) makes teaching the concept of blending a lot easier for child and teacher. Thus, if you want to teach blending, “sat” and “rat” make early blending more manageable than the proverbial “cat.”

Whoa.

In a survey of three communities in Los Angeles, there were startling differences in how many books were available to children. In the most underprivileged community, no children’s books were found in the homes; in the low-income to middle-income community there were, on average, three books; and in the affluent community there were around 200 books.

Fluency is not a matter of speed; it is a matter of being able to utilize all the special knowledge a child has about a word—its letters, letter patterns, meanings, grammatical functions, roots, and endings—fast enough to have time to think and comprehend. Everything about a word contributes to how fast it can be read.

So much of a child’s life is lived for others. . . . All the reading I did as a child, behind closed doors, sitting on the bed while the darkness fell around me, was an act of reclamation. This and only this I did for myself. This was the way to make my life my own. —LYNNE SHARON SCHWARTZ

One of the most powerful moments in the reading life, potentially as transformative as Socrates’ dialogues, occurs as fluent comprehending readers learn to enter into the lives of imagined heroes and heroines, along the Mississippi or through a wardrobe portal.

Children’s desire to read reflects their immersion in the “reading life.” Comprehension emerges out of all the cognitive, linguistic, emotional, social, and instructional factors in the child’s prior development, and Proust’s “divine pleasure” in immersing oneself in reading pushes it forward.

And so to completely analyze what we do when we read would almost be the acme of a psychologist’s achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind, as well as to unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable specific performance that civilization has learned in all its history. —SIR EDMUND HUEY

The end of reading development doesn’t exist; the unending story of reading moves ever forward, leaving the eye, the tongue, the word, the author for a new place from which the “truth breaks forth, fresh and green,” changing the brain and the reader every time.

After several years, Monsieur X suffered a stroke that destroyed all his ability to read and write and caused his death.

Order of events is important here, but yeah death would definitely do it.

Children with any form of dyslexia are not “dumb” or “stubborn”; nor are they “not working to potential”—the three most frequent descriptions they endure. However, they will be mistakenly described in these ways many times by many people, including themselves. It is vital for parents and teachers to work to ensure that all children with any form of reading problem receive immediate, intensive intervention, and that no child or adult equates reading problems with low intelligence. A comprehensive support system should be in place from the first indication of difficulty until the child becomes an independent, fluent reader, or the frustrations of reading failure can lead to a cycle of learning failure, dropping out, and delinquency. Most important, the considerable potential of these children will be lost to themselves and to society.

I 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

Reading is an act of interiority, pure and simple. Its object is not the mere consumption of information. . . . Rather, reading is the occasion of the encounter with the self. . . . The book is the best thing human beings have done yet. —JAMES CARROLL

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.

Ultimately, the questions Socrates raised for Athenian youth apply equally to our own. Will unguided information lead to an illusion of knowledge, and thus curtail the more difficult, time-consuming, critical thought processes that lead to knowledge itself? Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another’s inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?

If reading is not acquired on society’s schedule, these suddenly disinherited children will never feel the same about themselves. They will have learned they are different, and no one ever tells them that, evolutionarily, this might be for good reason.

The mysterious, invisible gift of time to think beyond is the reading brain’s greatest achievement; these built-in milliseconds form the basis of our ability to propel knowledge, to ponder virtue, and to articulate what was once inexpressible—which, when expressed, builds the next platform from which we dive below or soar above.