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

by Maryanne Wolf

WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago.

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

Reading can be learned only because of the brain’s plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually.

“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.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those . . . we spent with a favorite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure:

While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. “Passing over,” a term used by the theologian John Dunne, describes the process through which reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person’s consciousness.

Swinney discovered that the brain doesn’t find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it. The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children.

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 or spoken language, which are preprogrammed.

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 patterns in information; and the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these areas automatically.

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.

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.

Children who begin kindergarten having heard and used thousands of words, whose meanings are already understood, classified, and stored away in their young brains, have the advantage on the playing field of education. Children who never have a story read to them, who never hear words that rhyme, who never imagine fighting with dragons or marrying a prince, have the odds overwhelmingly against them.

All this enables us to become specialists in identifying various sensory information—whether tracks of woolly mammoths or tokens for goats. It is all of a piece.

By teaching new generations to use an increasing repertoire of symbols, our ancestors essentially passed on knowledge about the brain’s capability for adaptation and change. Our brain was preparing to read.

As they began to add new words, the Sumerians incorporated what is called a rebus principle in their writing. This occurs when a symbol (for example, “bird”) represents not its meaning but rather its sound, which in Sumerian was a word’s first syllable. In this way, the symbol for “bird” could do double duty—as its meaning or its speech sound.

In current terms, the Sumerians used the first known metacognitive strategy to teach reading. That is, Sumerian teachers gave their pupils tools that made explicit how to learn something, and how to remember it.

From some 700 standard signs in the Middle Egyptian period, the number of Egyptian hieroglyphs grew over the next millennium to several thousand, some of which became weighed down with layer after layer of religiously encrypted meanings, learnable by fewer and fewer people.

We know from millions of Chinese readers, who daily acquire fluent reading also using thousands of characters, that the decline and fall of the Egyptian writing system cannot be explained simply by the quantitative demands on visual memory.

Urton surprised linguists and Inca scholars with his hypothesis that the 600 or so quipus that still exist represent an undeciphered Incan written language system. Each type of knot, each direction of the knot, and each color may denote linguistic information, just as each knot in the Jewish tallith, or shawl, does.

Until now, quipus were thought to have functioned like an abacus, although 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 ...

Today, Urton and his colleagues are trying to use the remaining quipus to decipher what may well be the equivalent of anothe...

There is a land called Crete . . . ringed by the wine-dark sea with rolling whitecaps—handsome country, fertile, thronged with people well past counting—boasting ninety cities, language mixing with language side by side. —HOMER, Odyssey

Those who can read see twice as well. —MENANDER (FOURTH CENTURY BCE)

The mysterious script of Wadi el-Hol is important because it concentrates our attention on the first of two multidimensional questions about a new adaptation of the brain for reading. First, what makes up an alphabet and what separates it from the vestiges of a previous syllabary, or logosyllabary? Responses to that question prepare us to explore the second, larger question: are there significant intellectual resources unique to the alphabet-reading brain?

In Ugarit, different peoples spoke at least ten languages, and five scripts could be found in addition to its own. More important, the people of Ugarit left behind a significant corpus of writings remarkable because it exhibits several key contributions of an alphabetic system.

One of the most thought-provoking issues about it concerns the extent to which the oral and written Ugaritic language influenced the writing of the Hebrew Bible.

Another surprising discovery about the Ugaritic script involves its use of an “abecedary,” as linguists call any system that lists the letters of a script in a fixed order. A curious item in the history of writing is that the same sequence in the Ugaritic abecedary characterized a second-millennium proto-Canaanite script, which went on to become the Phoenician consonantal system, which went on to become the Greek alphabet—or so the widely accepted account goes. Thus the abecedary is evidence of a link between these two candidates for early alphabets and also suggests some early schooling system that standardized the learning of letters in a fixed order. Like the Sumerians’ use of lists, such an ordering gives novice readers a cognitive strategy for more easily remembering the characters of their script. But the use of this fascinating script ended when invaders destroyed Ugarit around 1200 BCE.

The efficient reading brain, which took Sumerian, Akkadian, and Egyptian pupils years to develop, quite literally has more time to think.

Scholars in several disciplines continue to spar over the major conditions for a “true alphabet,” based on the definitions in their own fields.

the classicist Eric Havelock stipulated three criteria: a limited number of letters or characters (the optimal range was between twenty and thirty characters), a comprehensive set of characters capable of conveying the minimal sound units of the language, and a complete correspondence between each phoneme in the language and each visual sign or letter.

On this basis, classicists insist that all the alphabet-like systems before the Greek alphabet fa...

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

Four millennia ago Minoans built monuments and made art and jewelry of incomparable beauty, and they created systems of writing that continue to frustrate our best efforts at decipherment.

That said, according to no small number of myths, the alphabet came to Greece from Cadmus (in Greek, Kadmos), the legendary founder of Thebes, whose name means “east” in Semitic.

Whatever the intention, Greek myths about how the gods gave letters to the mortal Cadmus rival the tales of the Grimm brothers for gore; at least one version ends with Cadmus strewing bloodied teeth (metaphorical letters) into the ground to grow and spread.

In a pathbreaking meta-analysis of twenty-five imaging studies of different languages, cognitive scientists from the University of Pittsburgh found three great common regions used differentially across writing systems. In the first, the occipital-temporal area (which includes the hypothesized locus of “neuronal recycling” for literacy), we become proficient visual specialists in whatever script we read. In the second, the frontal region around Broca’s area, we become specialists in two different ways—for phonemes in words and for their meanings. In the third, the multifunction region spanning the upper temporal lobes and the lower, adjacent parietal lobes, we recruit additional areas that help to process multiple elements of sounds and meanings, which are particularly important for alphabetic and syllabary systems.

This system connects regions in the frontal, temporal-parietal, and occipital lobes—in other words, select areas from all four lobes of the brain.

Factors like the number of symbols in a writing system, the sound structure of an oral language, the degree of regularity in a written language, the degree of abstraction, and the extent of motoric involvement in learning a script will

influence both the efficiency and the specific circuitry of a writing system.

Together, they contribute to how easily the novice reader...

CLAIM 2: THE ALPHABET STIMULATES NOVEL THOUGHT BEST

As the twentieth-century Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky said, the act of putting spoken words and unspoken thoughts into written words releases and, in

the process, changes the thoughts themselves.