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July 19, 2020
If we could modify the structure and wiring of the brain, that would be a fundamental game changer in terms of who we are, what we decide, what we think. . . . We are in a different phase1 of evolution; the future of life is now in our hands. It is no longer just natural evolution, but human-driven evolution. —Juan Enriquez and Steve Gullans
Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.2 —David Ulin
Unlike in the past, we possess both the science and the technology to identify potential changes in how we read—and thus how we think—before such changes are fully entrenched in the population and accepted without our comprehension of the consequences.
We have emotionally and mentally caught up to our technology and are able to use this maturity to guide our own species.
The building of this knowledge can provide the theoretical basis for changing technology to redress its own weaknesses, whether in more refined digital modes of reading or the creation of alternative, developmentally hybrid approaches to acquiring it. What we can learn, therefore, about the impact of different forms of reading on cognition and culture has profound implications for the next reading brains. Thus equipped, we will have the capacity to help shape the changing reading circuits in our children and our children’s children in wiser and better-informed ways.
Thesis of the book.
Duino Elegies4 by Rilke
Blue highlight means a book to check out.
Proust and the Squid:6 The Story and Science of the Reading Brain.
Previous book of this author.
This leads us to the present moment and the difficult, more specific questions that arise for children raised within a digital milieu, and ourselves. Will new readers develop the more time-demanding cognitive processes nurtured by print-based mediums as they absorb and acquire new cognitive capacities emphasized by digital media? For example, will the combination of reading on digital formats and daily immersion in a variety of digital experiences—from social media to virtual games—impede the formation of the slower cognitive processes such as critical thinking, personal reflection,
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Main questions of the book.
In other words, through no intention on anyone’s part, will the increasing reliance of our youth on the servers of knowledge prove the greatest threat to the young brain’s building of its own foundation of knowledge, as well as to a child’s desire to think and imagine for him- or herself? Or will these new technologies provide the best, most complete bridge yet to ever more sophisticated forms of cognition and imagination that will enable our children to leap into new worlds of knowledge that we can’t even conceive of in this moment of time? Will they develop a range of very different brain
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More main questions to be answered in the book.
futurists Juan Enriquez10 and Steve Gullans wrote in Evolving Ourselves: How Unnatural Selection and Nonrandom Mutation Are Changing Life on Earth,
Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters12 to a Young Poet
Italo Calvino’s Six Memos for the Next Millennium13
of Kant’s three questions14: What do we know? What should we do? What can we hope?
now. Within these pages the meanings of good reader have little to do with how well anyone decodes words; they have everything to do with being faithful to what Proust once described as the heart of the reading act, going beyond the wisdom of the author to discover one’s own.
Aristotle wrote that the good society16 has three lives: the life of knowledge and productivity; the life of entertainment and the Greeks’ special relationship to leisure; and finally, the life of contemplation.
Kurt Vonnegut compared the role of the artist in society to that of the canary in the mines: both alert us to the presence of danger.
Like St. Thomas Aquinas, I look at disagreement as the place where “iron sharpens iron.”17
what Proust hoped for each of his readers: It seemed to me that they would not be18 “my readers” but readers of their own selves, my book being merely a sort of magnifying glass. . . . I would furnish them with the means of reading what lay inside themselves.
The Brain—is wider than the Sky—1 For—put them side by side— The one the other will contain With ease—and You—beside The Brain is deeper than the sea— For—hold them—Blue to Blue The one the other will absorb— As Sponges—Buckets—do— The Brain is just the weight of God— For—Heft them—Pound for Pound— And they will differ—if they do— As Syllable from Sound— —Emily Dickinson
The neuroscientist David Eagleman recently wrote3 that the brain’s cells are “connected to one another in a network of such staggering complexity that it bankrupts human language and necessitates new strains of mathematics. . . . there are as many connections in a single cubic centimeter of brain tissues as there are stars in the Milky Way galaxy.”
It is the capacity to make these mind-reeling numbers of connections that allows our brain to go beyond its original functions to form a completely new circuit for reading.4 A new circuit was necessary because reading is neither natural nor innate; rather, it is an unnatural cultural invention that has been scarcely six thousand years in existence.
“plasticity within limits”
design. What amazes me most is not the brain’s multiple sophisticated functions, but the fact that it is able to go beyond its original, biologically endowed functions—like vision and language—to develop totally unknown capacities such as reading and numeracy. To do so, it forms a new set of pathways by connecting and sometimes repurposing aspects of its older and more basic structures.
As the Parisian neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene has noted,5 the brain recycles and even repurposes neuronal networks for skills that are cognitively or perceptually related to the new one. It is a wonderful example of our brain’s plasticity within limits.
In contrast to reading, oral language is one of our more basic human functions. As such, it possesses dedicated genes that unfold with minimal assistance to produce our capacities to speak and understand and think with words. In language, nature is nurtured by need in a fairly universal sequence around the world.
reading. To be sure, there are genes involved for basic capacities such as language and vision that become rearranged to form the reading circuit, but in and of themselves these genes do not produce the ability to read.
I want to underscore something essential here: with no genetic blueprint for reading, there is no one ideal reading circuit.
For example, a Chinese, character-based reading-brain6 circuit has both similarities to and discernible differences from an alphabet-reading brain.
design. The best-known design principle, neuroplasticity,8 underlies just about everything interesting about reading—from forming a new circuit by connecting older parts, to recycling existing neurons, to adding new and elaborated branches to the circuit over time.
The second principle invokes the contributions of the mid-twentieth-century psychologist Donald Hebb,9 who helped conceptualize how cells form working groups or cell assemblies, which help them to become specialists for particular functions.
In other words, for reading to occur, there must be sonic-speed automaticity for neuronal networks at a local level (i.e., within structural regions like the visual cortex), which, in turn, allows for equally rapid connections across entire structural expanses of the brain (e.g., connecting visual regions to language regions).
Map of the brain
The proximity and overlap of many parts of these rings are like a physical analogue to how closely aligned and interdependent their functions are.
Figure 2 Ring of Vision
15 In retinotopic organization, highly differentiated neurons in the retina trigger particular corresponding neurons in the visual areas. Not unlike having their own GPS system, the cyclists’ rapid-fire ability to locate the right neurons facilitates their extremely precise and swift transfer of information. In the case of letters, the retinal troupes have to learn to make these connections through multiple exposures in a long developmental process.
This learning is facilitated by the brain’s ability to make representations (think re-presentations) of patterns like letters.
If we think in terms of evolution, these stunningly efficient organizational principles make excellent sense and more than likely preserved the survival of many an ancestor before reading was ever invented. Just think how fast our earlier species needed to identify the tracks of predators—immediately. Rapid-fire recognition is exponentially facilitated by visual representations in our brains.
it will take many neuronal groups to ensure, first, that the visual information (i.e., the letters) is quickly connected with the correct sound- or phoneme-based information in our word, and, second, that this information is connected to all the word’s possible meanings and associations. English has around forty-four different phonemes18 (depending on the dialect used), represented here by forty-four exceedingly small actors jumping around impatiently in the dynamically expanding Language ring.
word. It also appears that the most frequently used sounds are given an advantage in their place in the ring, as if in anticipation of being chosen first in any matchup process.
Clearly nothing about the expert reading brain is left to chance, but rather is based on probabilities and prediction that, in turn, are based on context and prior knowledge.19
Just as the cognitive scientist David Swinney25 underscored years ago, our words contain and momentarily activate whole repositories of associated meanings, memories, and feelings, even when the exact meaning in a given context is specified.
Within this millisecond of recollection, we begin to appreciate the multilayered beauty in the brain’s design for storing and retrieving words: each word can elicit an entire history of myriad connections, associations, and long-stored emotions.
This final image of the reading brain’s connectedness conveys that at least as many things are happening in zigzagging, feed-forward, and feed-backward interactivity as are occurring linearly.28
Nicholas Kristof, a poem by Adrienne Rich, short stories by Andrea Barrett, a book on language by Ray Jackendoff, a work of literary criticism by Michael Dirda.
I think that reading, in its original essence,1 [is] that fertile miracle of communication effected in solitude. . . . We feel quite truly that our wisdom begins where that of the author leaves off. . . . But by a singular and moreover providential law . . . (a law which perhaps signifies that we are unable to receive the truth from anyone else but must create it ourselves), that which is the endpoint of their wisdom appears to us as but the beginning of our own. —Marcel Proust, On Reading
As Andy Clark4 persuasively writes, when we read words in sentences and longer text, we enter new cognitive territory, where prediction meets perception, and indeed, more often than not, precedes and prepares perception.
They accelerate perception by narrowing the possibilities of what we will read next to a set of words that correspond to what Gina Kuperberg calls “proactive”5 predictions. It’s what every smartphone is now doing as you type your words, if occasionally with wild (and sometimes embarrassing) misses.
Together, these interactions among perception, language, and deep-reading processes accelerate our understanding because they allow us to read a sentence of twenty words as a sum of predicted thoughts far more quickly than the sum of information provided by twenty individually read words.
It takes years for deep-reading processes to be formed, and as a society we need to be sure that we are vigilant about their development in our young from a very early age. It takes daily vigilance by us, the expert readers of our society, to choose to expend the extra milliseconds needed to maintain deep reading over time.
As the artist-writer Peter Mendelsund11 emphasized, what we “see” when we are reading helps us to co-create images with the author or sometimes, as in some fiction, through the author’s surrogate. It is similarly the case for the voice of the narrator we hear in both fiction and nonfiction. As one novelist describes this handoff, “Open a book and a voice speaks.12 A world, more or less alien or welcoming, emerges to enrich a reader’s store of hypotheses about how life is to be understood.”
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.13
Hemingway took a bet that he could write a story in six words and won.
