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

by Maryanne Wolf

As humans learned to use written language more and more precisely to convey their thoughts, their capacity for abstract t...

But within this history of writing, there is no debate that one of the best examples of the creative reciprocity between writing and thinking is the Greek alphabet.

This, then, marks the revolution in our intellectual history: the beginning democratization of the young reading brain.

Socrates himself wrote nothing at all. If we are to believe the account of his reasons given in Plato’s Phaedrus, it was because he believed that books could short-circuit the work of active critical understanding, producing a pupil who has a “false conceit of wisdom.” —MARTHA NUSSBAUM

Less known, if Plato’s descriptions of Socrates’ own history are factual, is that Socrates was the pupil of Diotima, a woman philosopher from Manitea, who used dialogues to teach her students.

The way of words, of knowing and loving words, is a way to the essence of things, and to the essence of knowing. —JOHN DUNNE

If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. —PHAEDRUS

Ultimately, Socrates did not fear reading. He feared superfluity of knowledge and its corollary—superficial understanding.

Among the many worlds which man did not receive as a gift of nature, but which he created with his own spirit, the world of books is the greatest. Every child, scrawling his first letters on his slate and attempting to read for the first time, in so doing, enters an artificial and most complicated world; to know the laws and rules of this world completely and to practice them perfectly, no single human life is long enough. Without words, without writing, and without books there would be no history, there could be no concept of humanity. —HERMANN HESSE

The association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process, and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one.

In this process we step outside ourselves for ever-lengthening moments and begin to understand the “other,” which Marcel Proust wrote lies at the heart of communication through written language.

Harold Goodglass once told me that for much of his early childhood, he was convinced that “elemeno” was a long letter in the middle of the alphabet.

Reading depends on the brain’s ability to connect and integrate various sources of information—specifically, visual with auditory, linguistic, and conceptual areas.

When asked by the reading expert Marilyn Adams what the “first sound” in “cat” was, one child promptly replied, “Meow”!

En gland

The reading scholar Jeanne Chall of Harvard taught that reading acquisition moves through a fairly orderly set of steps from pre-reader to expert reader, which we can study, “as if learning natural history or music.”

To structure this account, I introduce in the present chapter and Chapter 6 five types of readers: (1) emerging pre-reader, (2) novice reader, (3) decoding reader, (4) fluent comprehending reader, and (5) expert reader.

I love to repeat what reading specialist Merryl Pischa asked her young charges in Cambridge, Massachusetts, every year: “Why is it that the hardest thing children are ever asked to do is the first thing they’re asked to do!?”

When one realizes that children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their school years, and that at least 9,000 of these words need to be learned by the end of grade 3, the huge importance of a child’s development of vocabulary becomes crystal-clear.

Louisa Cook Moats calculates the sobering difference between linguistically advantaged children and disadvantaged children entering first grade at about 15,000 words.

They need to know and to feel comfortable about bugs that crawl, pester, drive, and spy on people.

There once was a beautiful bear who sat on a seat near to breaking and read by the hearth about how the earth was created. She smiled beatifically, full of ideas for the realm of her winter dreams.

Perhaps it is only in childhood that books have any deep influence on our lives. . . . I remember distinctly the suddenness with which a key turned in a lock and I found I could read—not just the sentences in a reading book with the syllables coupled like railway carriages, but a real book. It was paper-covered with the picture of a boy, bound and gagged, dangling at the end of a rope inside a well with the water rising above his waist—an adventure of Dixon Brett, detective. All a long summer holiday I kept my secret, as I believed: I did not want anybody to know that I could read. I suppose I half consciously realized even then that this was the dangerous moment. —GRAHAM GREENE

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.

It is the beginning of what will ultimately be the most important contribution of the reading brain: time to think.

my Canadian colleague Maureen Lovett refers to as “comprehension-monitoring.”

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

This gift of time is the physiological basis for our capacity to think “endless thoughts most wonderful.” Nothing is more important in the act of reading.

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

When adults read, the typical saccade covers about eight letters; for children it is less.

We now know that when we read in English, we actually see about fourteen or fifteen letters to the right of our fixed focus, and we see the same number of letters to the left if we read in Hebrew.

En gland

As Figure 6-6 shows, the more we know about the underlying life of any word, the more cumulative and convergent the contributions from different brain areas are, and the better and faster we read that word.

The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection, and with the crime, guilt—and there is the story of mankind. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; and another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world—and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. —JOHN STEINBECK

I would rather clean the mold around the bathtub than read. —A CHILD WITH DYSLEXIA

Recently, he concluded a speech at an international scientific conference on dyslexia by saying, “You will never understand what it feels like to be dyslexic. No matter how long you have worked in this area, no matter if your own children are dyslexic, you will never understand what it feels like to be humiliated your entire childhood and taught every day to believe that you will

never succeed at anything.”

En gland,

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

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

I differ with Kurzweil’s implicit assumption that an exponential acceleration of thought processes is altogether positive. In music, in poetry, and in life, the rest, the pause, the slow movements are essential to comprehending the whole.

Indeed, in our brain there are “delay neurons” whose sole function is to slow neuronal transmission by other neurons for mere milliseconds. These are the inestimable milliseconds that allow sequence and order in our apprehension of reality, and that enable us to plan and synchronize soccer moves and symphonic movements.

so-phisticated

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.

First, the ideal acquisition of reading is based on the development of an amazing panoply of phonological, semantic, syntactic, morphological, pragmatic, conceptual, social, affective, articulatory, and motor systems, and the ability of these systems to become integrated and synchronized into increasingly fluent comprehension.

Second, as reading develops, each of these abilities is facilitated further by this development. Knowing “what’s in a word” helps you read it better; reading a word deepens your understanding of its place in the continuum of knowledge.

During the phase in their reading development when critical skills are guided, modeled, practiced, and honed, they may have not been challenged to exploit the acme of the fully developed, reading brain: time to think for themselves.

Everyone involved in the education of the young—parents, teachers, scholars, policy makers—needs to ensure that each component of the reading process is sensibly, carefully, explicitly prepared for or taught from birth until full adulthood.

As an apt Viennese expression puts it, “If two choices appear before you, there’s usually a third.”