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Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
The act of reading is a miracle. Every new reader's brain possesses the extraordinary capacity to rearrange itself beyond its original abilities in order to understand written symbols. But how does the brain learn to read? As world-renowned cognitive neuroscientist and scholar of reading Maryanne Wolf explains in this impassioned book, we taught our brain to read only a few thousand years ago, and in the process changed the intellectual evolution of our species. Wolf tells us that the brain that examined tiny clay tablets in the cuneiform script of the Sumerians is configured differently from the brain that reads alphabets or of one literate in today's technology. There are critical implications to such an evolving brain. Just as writing reduced the need for memory, the proliferation of information and the particular requirements of digital culture may short-circuit some of written language's unique contributions—with potentially profound consequences for our future. Turning her attention to the development of the individual reading brain, Wolf draws on her expertise in dyslexia to investigate what happens when the brain finds it difficult to read. Interweaving her vast knowledge of neuroscience, psychology, literature, and linguistics, Wolf takes the reader from the brains of a pre-literate Homer to a literacy-ambivalent Plato, from an infant listening to Goodnight Moon to an expert reader of Proust, and finally to an often misunderstood child with dyslexia whose gifts may be as real as the challenges he or she faces. As we come to appreciate how the evolution and development of reading have changed the very arrangement of our brain and our intellectual life, we begin to realize with ever greater comprehension that we truly are what we read. Ambitious, provocative, and rich with examples, Proust and the Squid celebrates reading, one of the single most remarkable inventions in history. Once embarked on this magnificent story of the reading brain, you will never again take for granted your ability to absorb the written word.
308 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2007
1,188 people are currently reading
17.3k people want to read
About the author
Maryanne Wolf
16books280followersMaryanne Wolf received her doctorate from Harvard University in the Department of Human Development and Psychology in the Graduate School of Education, where she began her work on the neurological underpinnings of reading, language, and dyslexia. Professor Wolf was awarded the Distinguished Professor of the Year Award from the Massachusetts Psychological Association, and also the Teaching Excellence Award from the American Psychological Association.
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August 16, 2018
We may never fly in a hot-air balloon, win a race with a hare, or dance with a prince until the stroke of midnight, but through stories in books we can learn what it feels like. 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.
OK. Well. *sips coffee* Let's have at it.
First off, I want to say that this book really has fuck-all to do with Proust, or squids. She should have named it "Socrates and Dyslexia" or "The History and Future of Reading" or something.
Second of all, Wolf admits this is her first non-academic work and her first attempt to write for the public.
It shows. This is like a textbook, and it's hard to choke down. I could quote you a passage to illustrate this, but trust me - you wouldn't enjoy it and neither would I so I think we can just skip this part.
This is probably the biggest problem of the book. Mentally you've just got to put your armor on and plow through. Whether you even want to bother is your own choice.
WHAT THE BOOK IS ACTUALLY ABOUT
Wolf is covering three main ideas here.
1.) Reading is not innate in humans. Your brain is not wired to read. That is why each child must learn to read and it requires help.
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. 11
She goes into A LOT of scientific detail with this one. A LOT.
2.) Just like Socrates was irate and fearful by the advent of reading, people nowadays are terrified and curmudgeonly about what digital sources of information are 'doing to the children' and 'affecting children's minds' etc. etc. Both thought future generations were doomed.
Wolf points out that actually, Socrates was wrong about reading. It didn't destroy people's brains and their ability to learn. It didn't mean the end of thinking and intelligent discourse.
Even though she knows this, she is very leery of children living and learning in such a digital age. She fears it will damage their brains and perhaps mean that they will not be able to learn as deeply or thoroughly. Pretty much the same fears Socrates had about reading.
Most of this is, honestly, gatekeeping. Even though Wolf doesn't describe it that way, that's what it is.
This is particularly so because there has also never been a time when the complex beauty of the reading process stood more revealed, when the magnitude of its contributions was more clearly understood by science, or when these contributions seemed more in danger of being replaced by new forms of communication. Examining what we have and reflecting on what we want to preserve are the leitmotifs of these pages.
Look at this:
Underneath his ever-present humor and seasoned irony lies a profound fear that literacy without guidance of a teacher or of a society permits dangerous access to knowledge. Reading presented Socrates with a new version of Pandora's box: once written language was released there could be no accounting for what would be written, who would read it, or how readers might interpret it. 77
This is some classic, Catholic Church gatekeeping type shit. Don't learn how to read! Don't read the Bible! We, the learned, will read it FOR you and INTERPRET it for you because your uneducated brains can't handle pure knowledge. You'd probably interpret it THE WRONG WAY. Don't strain yourself! We'll do all the work. :) Leave it in our capable hands.
Knowledge in the 'wrong hands' is dangerous stuff! It's a good idea to only let your elders and your leaders know stuff, so that you don't fuck it up! It's for your own good.
What a crock of shit, both on the part of Catholicism and Socrates. And now Wolf is of the same mindset. She frets incessantly (I make it sound like she breaks from her boring-textbook writing- she does not) about how little children might become brain-weak and dumb from consuming digital information 'instantly' instead of having to 'digest' it through reading. Danger!
I also have no idea what she is actually talking about. What kind of digital media does she think children are consuming? As far as I know, it is still impossible to download data directly into your brain. Is it YouTube? Twitter? Wikipedia? What has her so worried and upset? It's never explained. She keeps talking as if one can get 'instant data transfer' from the internet, but as far as I know, that's not possible. I'm very confused as to what she is specifically worried about.
But even she admits it is quixotic to think you can staunch the gush of digital advancement. There's only so much gatekeeping you can do successfully. Reading became prominent and world-wide, there was no way to stop it. Just like you can't put computers back. They exist now. The internet exists now. Thinking you can raise your child without Internet or computers to age 18 is... technically possible, I guess, but if you live in a first-world country it might be more than a challenge. I guess you could home school them AND also live in a rural area AND also forbid them from ever leaving the house. And not own a TV. Or any cell phones. Or having any friends.
Fluent, silent comprehension in the later phases of reading development would have symbolized for Socrates the most dangerous moment in literacy, because it makes the reader autonomous. It gives each new reader time to make predictions, to form new thoughts, to go beyond the text, and to become an independent learner. 224
See? Keep people ignorant, it really is for the best. /s
ANYWAY.
Equally courageous, Socrates feared above all else that the "semblance of truth,"conveyed by the seeming permanence of this written language, would lead to the end of the search for true knowledge, and that this loss would mean the death of human virtue as we know it. Socrates never knew the secret at the heart of reading: the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before. 229
3.) Dyslexia Now, when we realize on page 21 that her firstborn son has dyslexia, it all suddenly becomes clear to us.
This book is a bit like or that book I read that said that autism was the next stage of human evolution.
When people belong to a group that is maligned or not valued, it is only natural human instinct to try and insist that this group is powerful and special.
It's not bad, but Wolf spends a lot of time - like Cain does in Quiet - talking about how amazing dyslexics are and how full of untapped potential they are and how creative they are.
She also talks about how hurtful and permanently damaging it is to make a child feel like he's stupid or worthless because he struggles with reading.
All of these are valid points, but you know. A little saccharine. Cain, I think paints introverts as magical fairies more than Wolf paints dyslexics as powerful artists - but that's mainly due to writing style. Wolf can't break out of her dry, textbook speak to attempt to do what Cain was doing.
The most important thing I think Wolf covers is how important it is to diagnose dyslexia early, help children to learn to read even if they may have some sort of learning challenge, and build a kid up instead of making him feel like shit. These are important, good ideas. She also helpfully points out that all forms of dyslexia are NOT the same and not set at the same degree.
As for her insinuations that people with dyslexia are geniuses, poised for great things - I mean, it varies. Some people with dyslexia are great artists and company CEOS (being a CEO is always held up as some great marker of being amazing. I don't agree, but it seems a go-to for many people). But some people with dyslexia are average. Some introverts are amazing, revolutionary people or world leaders. But some are average. Some people with autism do amazing, wonderful things that change the world. But some live out lives that don't end up with them being rich, famous, or widely lauded geniuses. Just like any population or sub-population.
I understand it is super-important to her because of her son, though. I understand her urge to see powerful people as dyslexic, search for evidence of dyslexia in every single famous person she comes across, and her obsession with how smart, talented, wonderful, and brilliant people with dyslexia are. I completely understand. But like in , I'm just like "... ... ...."
These books are very important for helping people develop self-esteem. Parents of children with autism and dyslexia may need reminders that even though the world is hard for and punishes people with autism and dyslexia, there is hope and goodness and wonder. I never saw introverts as a persecuted group, honestly, but Cain told me that they are and how they should be JUST as respected and lauded as extroverts. Which I have no argument for, it's just that reading books like this are a bit... like reading someone patting themselves on the back for twelve hours. Not very interesting.
You probably will get the most out of this book as a parent of someone with dyslexia, because that is the angle Wolf is writing from and probably who will relate to her the most. She talks about teaching children with dyslexia to read: the challenges, the tips, the sweetness of success.
However, if you do not have dyslexia or do not have a child with dyslexia or are not a reading teacher, you might not be as glued to the pages. Just a warning. It's only about 1/3 of the book that focuses on dyslexia, though.
What is it about the dyslexic brain that seems linked in some people to unparalleled creativity in their professions, which often involve design, spatial skills, and the recognition of patterns? Was the differently organized brain of a person with dyslexia better suited for the demands of the preliterate past, with its emphasis on building and exploring? Will individuals with dyslexia be even better suited to the visual, technology-dominated future? Is the most current imaging and genetic research giving us the outlines of a very unusual brain organization in some persons with dyslexia that may ultimately explain both their known weaknesses and our steadily growing understanding of their strengths? 22
See, this is almost exactly like the book I read that claimed people with autism were the next stage in human evolution, and that eventually all humans would be autistic, because autism equips people to live better in the future we are creating. It's a strange viewpoint.
Things ARE changing. For instance, they are talking about re-working IQ tests because they think the scores may not be valid anymore, due to the changing nature of learning and processing information.
TL;DR This book was not what I expected. For one thing, Wolf does not have an easy or accessible style. This reads like a scientific journal. That may appeal to you. If you are a person who claims most non-fiction is 'dumbed-down,' you will love this. For the rest of us, I would rather read . Wolf is neither entertaining nor easy to chew. She has some valuable information in here, and she makes some great points. Unfortunately, I think most readers will put the book down rather than choose to plow through the verbiage.
When Wolf covers the history and development of reading, it's debatable how much interest you will have in this. She does educate you and tell you things you didn't know before. She does a bit of jerking-off about how great, amazing, wonderful, transportative, and life-changing reading is. And, okay, that's true, but I don't want to read about it. Luckily for me, she doesn't focus on this for eight hours. It's relatively mild. This isn't or - thank heaven, I thought those books were utter crap.
Then Wolf tackles how the digital age and advancement of technology might destroy our brains and intelligence. She's self-aware enough to know that this is futile - no one can stop the digital age. But still, she is distressed about The Children. She never specifies exactly what technologies she is so petrified of, though. Perhaps she will expound on it in her book that comes out this Tuesday: . I bet she has a lot to say.
I think it was great and interesting how she compared modern-day terror of digital learning to Socrates' terror of reading and the written word.
Lastly, she addresses dyslexia. This section probably would be of the most worth to people with dyslexia, people who are parents to children with dyslexia, and people who teach reading. She also does a little shine-job on dyslexia and it's possible marker for genius and artistry. I took this with a grain of salt.
Certainly my children's eighty-six-year-old Jewish grandmother, Lotte Noam, would flummox future generations. On almost any occasion she can supply an appropriate three-stanza poem from Rilke, a passage from Goethe, or a bawdy limerick - to the infinite delight of her grandsons. Once, in a burst of envy, I asked Lotte how she could ever memorize so many poems and jokes. She answered simply, "I always wanted to have something no one could take away if I was ever put into a concentration camp." 76
OK. Well. *sips coffee* Let's have at it.
First off, I want to say that this book really has fuck-all to do with Proust, or squids. She should have named it "Socrates and Dyslexia" or "The History and Future of Reading" or something.
Second of all, Wolf admits this is her first non-academic work and her first attempt to write for the public.
It shows. This is like a textbook, and it's hard to choke down. I could quote you a passage to illustrate this, but trust me - you wouldn't enjoy it and neither would I so I think we can just skip this part.
This is probably the biggest problem of the book. Mentally you've just got to put your armor on and plow through. Whether you even want to bother is your own choice.
WHAT THE BOOK IS ACTUALLY ABOUT
Wolf is covering three main ideas here.
1.) Reading is not innate in humans. Your brain is not wired to read. That is why each child must learn to read and it requires help.
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. 11
She goes into A LOT of scientific detail with this one. A LOT.
2.) Just like Socrates was irate and fearful by the advent of reading, people nowadays are terrified and curmudgeonly about what digital sources of information are 'doing to the children' and 'affecting children's minds' etc. etc. Both thought future generations were doomed.
Wolf points out that actually, Socrates was wrong about reading. It didn't destroy people's brains and their ability to learn. It didn't mean the end of thinking and intelligent discourse.
Even though she knows this, she is very leery of children living and learning in such a digital age. She fears it will damage their brains and perhaps mean that they will not be able to learn as deeply or thoroughly. Pretty much the same fears Socrates had about reading.
Most of this is, honestly, gatekeeping. Even though Wolf doesn't describe it that way, that's what it is.
This is particularly so because there has also never been a time when the complex beauty of the reading process stood more revealed, when the magnitude of its contributions was more clearly understood by science, or when these contributions seemed more in danger of being replaced by new forms of communication. Examining what we have and reflecting on what we want to preserve are the leitmotifs of these pages.
Look at this:
Underneath his ever-present humor and seasoned irony lies a profound fear that literacy without guidance of a teacher or of a society permits dangerous access to knowledge. Reading presented Socrates with a new version of Pandora's box: once written language was released there could be no accounting for what would be written, who would read it, or how readers might interpret it. 77
This is some classic, Catholic Church gatekeeping type shit. Don't learn how to read! Don't read the Bible! We, the learned, will read it FOR you and INTERPRET it for you because your uneducated brains can't handle pure knowledge. You'd probably interpret it THE WRONG WAY. Don't strain yourself! We'll do all the work. :) Leave it in our capable hands.
Knowledge in the 'wrong hands' is dangerous stuff! It's a good idea to only let your elders and your leaders know stuff, so that you don't fuck it up! It's for your own good.
What a crock of shit, both on the part of Catholicism and Socrates. And now Wolf is of the same mindset. She frets incessantly (I make it sound like she breaks from her boring-textbook writing- she does not) about how little children might become brain-weak and dumb from consuming digital information 'instantly' instead of having to 'digest' it through reading. Danger!
I also have no idea what she is actually talking about. What kind of digital media does she think children are consuming? As far as I know, it is still impossible to download data directly into your brain. Is it YouTube? Twitter? Wikipedia? What has her so worried and upset? It's never explained. She keeps talking as if one can get 'instant data transfer' from the internet, but as far as I know, that's not possible. I'm very confused as to what she is specifically worried about.
But even she admits it is quixotic to think you can staunch the gush of digital advancement. There's only so much gatekeeping you can do successfully. Reading became prominent and world-wide, there was no way to stop it. Just like you can't put computers back. They exist now. The internet exists now. Thinking you can raise your child without Internet or computers to age 18 is... technically possible, I guess, but if you live in a first-world country it might be more than a challenge. I guess you could home school them AND also live in a rural area AND also forbid them from ever leaving the house. And not own a TV. Or any cell phones. Or having any friends.
Fluent, silent comprehension in the later phases of reading development would have symbolized for Socrates the most dangerous moment in literacy, because it makes the reader autonomous. It gives each new reader time to make predictions, to form new thoughts, to go beyond the text, and to become an independent learner. 224
See? Keep people ignorant, it really is for the best. /s
ANYWAY.
Equally courageous, Socrates feared above all else that the "semblance of truth,"conveyed by the seeming permanence of this written language, would lead to the end of the search for true knowledge, and that this loss would mean the death of human virtue as we know it. Socrates never knew the secret at the heart of reading: the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before. 229
3.) Dyslexia Now, when we realize on page 21 that her firstborn son has dyslexia, it all suddenly becomes clear to us.
This book is a bit like or that book I read that said that autism was the next stage of human evolution.
When people belong to a group that is maligned or not valued, it is only natural human instinct to try and insist that this group is powerful and special.
It's not bad, but Wolf spends a lot of time - like Cain does in Quiet - talking about how amazing dyslexics are and how full of untapped potential they are and how creative they are.
She also talks about how hurtful and permanently damaging it is to make a child feel like he's stupid or worthless because he struggles with reading.
All of these are valid points, but you know. A little saccharine. Cain, I think paints introverts as magical fairies more than Wolf paints dyslexics as powerful artists - but that's mainly due to writing style. Wolf can't break out of her dry, textbook speak to attempt to do what Cain was doing.
The most important thing I think Wolf covers is how important it is to diagnose dyslexia early, help children to learn to read even if they may have some sort of learning challenge, and build a kid up instead of making him feel like shit. These are important, good ideas. She also helpfully points out that all forms of dyslexia are NOT the same and not set at the same degree.
As for her insinuations that people with dyslexia are geniuses, poised for great things - I mean, it varies. Some people with dyslexia are great artists and company CEOS (being a CEO is always held up as some great marker of being amazing. I don't agree, but it seems a go-to for many people). But some people with dyslexia are average. Some introverts are amazing, revolutionary people or world leaders. But some are average. Some people with autism do amazing, wonderful things that change the world. But some live out lives that don't end up with them being rich, famous, or widely lauded geniuses. Just like any population or sub-population.
I understand it is super-important to her because of her son, though. I understand her urge to see powerful people as dyslexic, search for evidence of dyslexia in every single famous person she comes across, and her obsession with how smart, talented, wonderful, and brilliant people with dyslexia are. I completely understand. But like in , I'm just like "... ... ...."
These books are very important for helping people develop self-esteem. Parents of children with autism and dyslexia may need reminders that even though the world is hard for and punishes people with autism and dyslexia, there is hope and goodness and wonder. I never saw introverts as a persecuted group, honestly, but Cain told me that they are and how they should be JUST as respected and lauded as extroverts. Which I have no argument for, it's just that reading books like this are a bit... like reading someone patting themselves on the back for twelve hours. Not very interesting.
You probably will get the most out of this book as a parent of someone with dyslexia, because that is the angle Wolf is writing from and probably who will relate to her the most. She talks about teaching children with dyslexia to read: the challenges, the tips, the sweetness of success.
However, if you do not have dyslexia or do not have a child with dyslexia or are not a reading teacher, you might not be as glued to the pages. Just a warning. It's only about 1/3 of the book that focuses on dyslexia, though.
What is it about the dyslexic brain that seems linked in some people to unparalleled creativity in their professions, which often involve design, spatial skills, and the recognition of patterns? Was the differently organized brain of a person with dyslexia better suited for the demands of the preliterate past, with its emphasis on building and exploring? Will individuals with dyslexia be even better suited to the visual, technology-dominated future? Is the most current imaging and genetic research giving us the outlines of a very unusual brain organization in some persons with dyslexia that may ultimately explain both their known weaknesses and our steadily growing understanding of their strengths? 22
See, this is almost exactly like the book I read that claimed people with autism were the next stage in human evolution, and that eventually all humans would be autistic, because autism equips people to live better in the future we are creating. It's a strange viewpoint.
Things ARE changing. For instance, they are talking about re-working IQ tests because they think the scores may not be valid anymore, due to the changing nature of learning and processing information.
TL;DR This book was not what I expected. For one thing, Wolf does not have an easy or accessible style. This reads like a scientific journal. That may appeal to you. If you are a person who claims most non-fiction is 'dumbed-down,' you will love this. For the rest of us, I would rather read . Wolf is neither entertaining nor easy to chew. She has some valuable information in here, and she makes some great points. Unfortunately, I think most readers will put the book down rather than choose to plow through the verbiage.
When Wolf covers the history and development of reading, it's debatable how much interest you will have in this. She does educate you and tell you things you didn't know before. She does a bit of jerking-off about how great, amazing, wonderful, transportative, and life-changing reading is. And, okay, that's true, but I don't want to read about it. Luckily for me, she doesn't focus on this for eight hours. It's relatively mild. This isn't or - thank heaven, I thought those books were utter crap.
Then Wolf tackles how the digital age and advancement of technology might destroy our brains and intelligence. She's self-aware enough to know that this is futile - no one can stop the digital age. But still, she is distressed about The Children. She never specifies exactly what technologies she is so petrified of, though. Perhaps she will expound on it in her book that comes out this Tuesday: . I bet she has a lot to say.
I think it was great and interesting how she compared modern-day terror of digital learning to Socrates' terror of reading and the written word.
Lastly, she addresses dyslexia. This section probably would be of the most worth to people with dyslexia, people who are parents to children with dyslexia, and people who teach reading. She also does a little shine-job on dyslexia and it's possible marker for genius and artistry. I took this with a grain of salt.
Certainly my children's eighty-six-year-old Jewish grandmother, Lotte Noam, would flummox future generations. On almost any occasion she can supply an appropriate three-stanza poem from Rilke, a passage from Goethe, or a bawdy limerick - to the infinite delight of her grandsons. Once, in a burst of envy, I asked Lotte how she could ever memorize so many poems and jokes. She answered simply, "I always wanted to have something no one could take away if I was ever put into a concentration camp." 76
December 7, 2016
This is a book I frequently return to, checking facts, and reminding myself what a wondrous thing reading actually is.
Maryanne Wolf masters the difficult balance between an enjoyable book full of anecdotes and a sound scientific research on the processes of the brain while reading. I was fascinated by the several pages long description of what happens in my head while I read just ONE SENTENCE. After I had finished the description, I went back and reread the section (it took about 20 minutes), and again, could not quite visualise how my brain could do all that while I was just trying to make sense of the content.
Woolf explains the difference between deeply concentrated reading and skimming through articles (online), and she gives a detailed account of dyslexia, from a very personal perspective. I finished the book with a satisfying feeling of knowing more and yet wanting to learn so much still.
Very readable!
Maryanne Wolf masters the difficult balance between an enjoyable book full of anecdotes and a sound scientific research on the processes of the brain while reading. I was fascinated by the several pages long description of what happens in my head while I read just ONE SENTENCE. After I had finished the description, I went back and reread the section (it took about 20 minutes), and again, could not quite visualise how my brain could do all that while I was just trying to make sense of the content.
Woolf explains the difference between deeply concentrated reading and skimming through articles (online), and she gives a detailed account of dyslexia, from a very personal perspective. I finished the book with a satisfying feeling of knowing more and yet wanting to learn so much still.
Very readable!
August 13, 2011
There are many things in life that need to be explained. One of those things is why is it that some people learn to read as if reading was like breathing or like fish taking to water, while others can struggle for decades and still only read haltingly and even then never quite ‘get� what it is they are reading? I know that looks like two things � actually, a moment’s reflection might make you think that what needs to be explained isn’t one or two things, but rather many, many more. Perhaps as many things need explaining as there are ways of becoming a good or poor reader and perhaps that is as many ways as there are people who do read.
This book takes it as a given that people are made by their genes and that their brains are too � and since reading is ultimately a way of using our brains, that this might mean that some of the ways in which reading can be made hard may well be genetic.
I have a lot of things to confess. Firstly, I don’t particularly like genetic explanations for complex social phenomena such as reading. Secondly, very many people in my immediate family struggle to read fluently. I count myself in that too, as I have never liked reading in public and will do an awful lot to avoid having to do it. Having had kids and knowing the benefits that their being read to would bring them made me read to them over the years � and that practice (and I suspect my interest in audio books) has made me better at reading aloud, but I would never be the first person in a room to offer to read the newspaper quiz, for example.
When I learnt to read, when I struggled to learn to read, I was definitely old enough to remember the experience � this was also true of my father, oddly enough, and my brother � but I consciously decided in my early teens that it was essential that I learn. I borrowed books from the library and I plodded (achingly slowly) through them. Prior to this I spent a lot of time in remedial literacy classes � classes the distorting lens of memory has located in a windowless room in one of my primary schools, a room with a decidedly Dickensian atmosphere and perhaps that is the reason I never read Dickens. Though truth be told, I’ve only thought of that excuse now, and will probably stick with ‘I don’t read him because he’s an opinionated old fart� as my reason of choice.
So, if there is a stuffed gene that hinders the brain in learning to read, I can only assume my family has double copies of it in both bold and italic - although as genes I guess that should be in denim and corduroy.
That said, there were other reasons for my hindered progress in learning to read. I was born with a rather impressive astigmatism which made whatever was written on the blackboard until this impairment was appropriately diagnosed and suitable glasses prescribed a world of smudges � I’ve never been as impressed with Impressionism as everyone else tends to be, Monet is merely how the world looks without my glasses on. And then there was the fact that I had arrived in Australia at five to a country unfamiliar with Belfast accents making communication with those around me almost impossible for the first few years. And this not being helped by my attending 7 different primary schools. All of these steps ought to have ensured I never learnt to read � but given the luck of a good and caring English teacher, and somehow being possessed of inexplicable desire to learn to read helped along by a healthy dose of Irish bloody-mindedness I ended up learning all the same. To me, learning to read has always seemed a happy accident, a matter of one kind of fate getting in the way of what looked like a much more certain destiny and, by dint of a fluke, I am here.
This book says there is little natural about learning to read � something I’ve always known to be true for sure. Reading has been around for far too short a time and available to far too few of us for us to have developed specialist genes to help with the task. Instead, we learn to read by putting brain structures (and therefore ultimately genes) to work that came into existence for quite different purposes. Reading requires multiple parts of the brain to work in tandem: sight, language centres, vocal areas, meaning centres � in fact, not just in tandem, but in sequence. Timing is everything with reading. And some brains are literally structured differently � things go wrong, the timing is out or the pathways that ‘work� so well for some people can’t be used for others and this causes delays in processing and difficulties or rather near impossibilities for certain would be readers. And like so much else in learning � those who can read find it impossible to have sympathy with those who cannot, and so those who can all too often assume those who can’t are being wilful or lazy or just plain stupid.
I read this book because Oliver Sacks recommended it in his The Mind’s Eye. In that book he makes it all too clear that our normal assumptions (that everyone has pretty much the same brain as ourselves) are completely off the mark.
I more or less skimmed over a lot of this book, though. I’m never going to know how important dysfunctions in the supramarginal gyrus are when compared with those of the angular gyrus or even those in Wernicke’s area � but it is nice to know people are looking into these things in their white lab coats and with their serious looking expressions on their faces. It is also good to know that we still have only such a superficial understanding of all of this, so much so that, like dropping a stone into an abyss, the main thing illuminated for me by all of this talk of brain areas was the depth of our ignorance.
For a long time I have thought that kids are much better off being taught to read using ‘whole language� and therefore learning to read ‘from meaning� rather than ‘phonics�. I still think there is a lot in this, in the end we all must learn to read by whole language, meaning is the only point of reading, after all � but this book has convinced me of the importance of giving kids phonetic skills along the way. My problem previously could be summed up by this wonderful paragraph from the book � a paragraph that asks by example how we should teach the pronunciation of the letter combination ‘ea�?
“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.�
We like to think that English can be learnt by starting with cat, bat, mat, fat, rat and working up from there � but create, beat, idea and read look like they were designed to make learning to read impossible for any sensible child - what possible hypothesis could they use to understand that sequence?
And that is the problem, or at least, part of the problem � English is not really phonetic, (something she says helps make English harder to learn than other languages and means particular kinds of dyslexia are more likely to be common in English) but it does use the alphabetic principle, and so I can see that it makes some sense to teach this to kids � if for no other reason than as a crutch until they get the idea that reading is about getting meaning from text and also to help them learn more to write, than to read. I think her various stages in learning to read are well worth understanding � particularly since what is being taught are patterns towards fluent reading.
The other interesting part of this book was around dyslexia � I’ve often worried that dyslexia really just means ‘not being able to read�. Other books I’ve read have referred to it as a ‘minimal brain dysfunction� � that is, if you can’t read then something must be going wrong with your brain, but since the brains that are dysfunctioning look exactly the same as the brains that aren’t � that something must be very, very small, hence, minimal brain dysfunction � although we can’t find what's wrong, we know it must be there. But this book claims some predictable differences in such things as patterns in brain lateralisation, right-hemisphere preferences and timing problems involved in parts of the brain lighting up while attempting to read have been associated with an inability to learn to read. As clear as her writing is, I have no idea if this is proof of brain problems associated with people not being able to read or not, to be honest. Nevertheless, she takes it as given that people with dyslexia tend to be more creative than people without dyslexia and even that they are much more likely to be artists and scientists and visionaries. Her son is one such person and she includes a drawing of his in this book - if I do have a form of dyslexia, it clearly isn't that form.
But learning to read is still important. And why? Well, because reading literally changes the way we think, the way our brains operate. It allows us to develop conceptual and syllogistic modes of thought that are virtually impossible to achieve in any other way. She spends a lot of time discussing Socrates and his objections to literacy � but she does not mention that it is highly unlikely that he would have been able to think in the way that he did in a pre-literate society. We have proof of this � there are still many pre-literate societies extant and research has been conducted into their cognitive abilities. See Luria’s work as an example .
This is quite a short book, but it does give an interesting overview of the history of literacy over the last few thousand years and of the all too many impediments that can stand in the way of children becoming literate. All the same very many of the barriers that stand in the way of achieving literacy are social rather than biological. We choose to underfund education and we choose to create under-classes. But there are consequences and costs to these choices � as the riots in England this week have shown all too clearly.
This book takes it as a given that people are made by their genes and that their brains are too � and since reading is ultimately a way of using our brains, that this might mean that some of the ways in which reading can be made hard may well be genetic.
I have a lot of things to confess. Firstly, I don’t particularly like genetic explanations for complex social phenomena such as reading. Secondly, very many people in my immediate family struggle to read fluently. I count myself in that too, as I have never liked reading in public and will do an awful lot to avoid having to do it. Having had kids and knowing the benefits that their being read to would bring them made me read to them over the years � and that practice (and I suspect my interest in audio books) has made me better at reading aloud, but I would never be the first person in a room to offer to read the newspaper quiz, for example.
When I learnt to read, when I struggled to learn to read, I was definitely old enough to remember the experience � this was also true of my father, oddly enough, and my brother � but I consciously decided in my early teens that it was essential that I learn. I borrowed books from the library and I plodded (achingly slowly) through them. Prior to this I spent a lot of time in remedial literacy classes � classes the distorting lens of memory has located in a windowless room in one of my primary schools, a room with a decidedly Dickensian atmosphere and perhaps that is the reason I never read Dickens. Though truth be told, I’ve only thought of that excuse now, and will probably stick with ‘I don’t read him because he’s an opinionated old fart� as my reason of choice.
So, if there is a stuffed gene that hinders the brain in learning to read, I can only assume my family has double copies of it in both bold and italic - although as genes I guess that should be in denim and corduroy.
That said, there were other reasons for my hindered progress in learning to read. I was born with a rather impressive astigmatism which made whatever was written on the blackboard until this impairment was appropriately diagnosed and suitable glasses prescribed a world of smudges � I’ve never been as impressed with Impressionism as everyone else tends to be, Monet is merely how the world looks without my glasses on. And then there was the fact that I had arrived in Australia at five to a country unfamiliar with Belfast accents making communication with those around me almost impossible for the first few years. And this not being helped by my attending 7 different primary schools. All of these steps ought to have ensured I never learnt to read � but given the luck of a good and caring English teacher, and somehow being possessed of inexplicable desire to learn to read helped along by a healthy dose of Irish bloody-mindedness I ended up learning all the same. To me, learning to read has always seemed a happy accident, a matter of one kind of fate getting in the way of what looked like a much more certain destiny and, by dint of a fluke, I am here.
This book says there is little natural about learning to read � something I’ve always known to be true for sure. Reading has been around for far too short a time and available to far too few of us for us to have developed specialist genes to help with the task. Instead, we learn to read by putting brain structures (and therefore ultimately genes) to work that came into existence for quite different purposes. Reading requires multiple parts of the brain to work in tandem: sight, language centres, vocal areas, meaning centres � in fact, not just in tandem, but in sequence. Timing is everything with reading. And some brains are literally structured differently � things go wrong, the timing is out or the pathways that ‘work� so well for some people can’t be used for others and this causes delays in processing and difficulties or rather near impossibilities for certain would be readers. And like so much else in learning � those who can read find it impossible to have sympathy with those who cannot, and so those who can all too often assume those who can’t are being wilful or lazy or just plain stupid.
I read this book because Oliver Sacks recommended it in his The Mind’s Eye. In that book he makes it all too clear that our normal assumptions (that everyone has pretty much the same brain as ourselves) are completely off the mark.
I more or less skimmed over a lot of this book, though. I’m never going to know how important dysfunctions in the supramarginal gyrus are when compared with those of the angular gyrus or even those in Wernicke’s area � but it is nice to know people are looking into these things in their white lab coats and with their serious looking expressions on their faces. It is also good to know that we still have only such a superficial understanding of all of this, so much so that, like dropping a stone into an abyss, the main thing illuminated for me by all of this talk of brain areas was the depth of our ignorance.
For a long time I have thought that kids are much better off being taught to read using ‘whole language� and therefore learning to read ‘from meaning� rather than ‘phonics�. I still think there is a lot in this, in the end we all must learn to read by whole language, meaning is the only point of reading, after all � but this book has convinced me of the importance of giving kids phonetic skills along the way. My problem previously could be summed up by this wonderful paragraph from the book � a paragraph that asks by example how we should teach the pronunciation of the letter combination ‘ea�?
“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.�
We like to think that English can be learnt by starting with cat, bat, mat, fat, rat and working up from there � but create, beat, idea and read look like they were designed to make learning to read impossible for any sensible child - what possible hypothesis could they use to understand that sequence?
And that is the problem, or at least, part of the problem � English is not really phonetic, (something she says helps make English harder to learn than other languages and means particular kinds of dyslexia are more likely to be common in English) but it does use the alphabetic principle, and so I can see that it makes some sense to teach this to kids � if for no other reason than as a crutch until they get the idea that reading is about getting meaning from text and also to help them learn more to write, than to read. I think her various stages in learning to read are well worth understanding � particularly since what is being taught are patterns towards fluent reading.
The other interesting part of this book was around dyslexia � I’ve often worried that dyslexia really just means ‘not being able to read�. Other books I’ve read have referred to it as a ‘minimal brain dysfunction� � that is, if you can’t read then something must be going wrong with your brain, but since the brains that are dysfunctioning look exactly the same as the brains that aren’t � that something must be very, very small, hence, minimal brain dysfunction � although we can’t find what's wrong, we know it must be there. But this book claims some predictable differences in such things as patterns in brain lateralisation, right-hemisphere preferences and timing problems involved in parts of the brain lighting up while attempting to read have been associated with an inability to learn to read. As clear as her writing is, I have no idea if this is proof of brain problems associated with people not being able to read or not, to be honest. Nevertheless, she takes it as given that people with dyslexia tend to be more creative than people without dyslexia and even that they are much more likely to be artists and scientists and visionaries. Her son is one such person and she includes a drawing of his in this book - if I do have a form of dyslexia, it clearly isn't that form.
But learning to read is still important. And why? Well, because reading literally changes the way we think, the way our brains operate. It allows us to develop conceptual and syllogistic modes of thought that are virtually impossible to achieve in any other way. She spends a lot of time discussing Socrates and his objections to literacy � but she does not mention that it is highly unlikely that he would have been able to think in the way that he did in a pre-literate society. We have proof of this � there are still many pre-literate societies extant and research has been conducted into their cognitive abilities. See Luria’s work as an example .
This is quite a short book, but it does give an interesting overview of the history of literacy over the last few thousand years and of the all too many impediments that can stand in the way of children becoming literate. All the same very many of the barriers that stand in the way of achieving literacy are social rather than biological. We choose to underfund education and we choose to create under-classes. But there are consequences and costs to these choices � as the riots in England this week have shown all too clearly.
December 15, 2024
If I'd read this book when it came out, I would have loved it; unfortunately I waited until after I'd read The Shallows and Reader, Come Home, and felt I'd seen a great deal of it before. But there was still plenty of material I didn't know about. In particular, she gives you a huge amount of detail about what happens in the brain when people read, and how much learning to read changes the brain's internal wiring. I hadn't appreciated just how large and fundamental the changes are.
Now a thought occurs to me which I'm surprised she didn't discuss. The brain of a literate person, she has convinced me, is quite different from the brain of a non-literate person. She has a long section on dyslexic people, and goes to some lengths to argue that they may have compensating skills, particularly in terms of creativity and visual abilities. This was interesting and unexpected, though it shouldn't have been; as soon as I'd read it, I thought of some of the dyslexic people I'd met, and realised that many of them fitted this pattern.
But there's another comparison point. Reading, as she explains, is an important, complex skill that's been gradually evolved by society over the last five or six thousand years. It's not the only such skill: in fact, I'm sure there are many of them. The first one I thought of was mathematics, and I'd expect that the difference between the mathematical brain and the non-mathematical brain would also be very large. It would not surprise me to find that it was even larger than the difference between the reading brain and the non-reading brain. I'd also be interested to know what happens to your brain when you become expert at playing a musical instrument, painting, or fixing machines. All of these are skills that have evolved over timespans comparable to that involved in developing reading, maybe even longer. Intuitively, it also changes you substantially to acquire them.
People must have studied these ideas, but I only thought of looking for relevant research now. I guess Maryanne Wolf's book is better than I first realised.
________________
I showed this review to o1, and it told me I might want to read Amalric and Dehaene's 2016 paper "Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians". Just downloaded it from Google Scholar: it does indeed look like an excellent recommendation.
Now a thought occurs to me which I'm surprised she didn't discuss. The brain of a literate person, she has convinced me, is quite different from the brain of a non-literate person. She has a long section on dyslexic people, and goes to some lengths to argue that they may have compensating skills, particularly in terms of creativity and visual abilities. This was interesting and unexpected, though it shouldn't have been; as soon as I'd read it, I thought of some of the dyslexic people I'd met, and realised that many of them fitted this pattern.
But there's another comparison point. Reading, as she explains, is an important, complex skill that's been gradually evolved by society over the last five or six thousand years. It's not the only such skill: in fact, I'm sure there are many of them. The first one I thought of was mathematics, and I'd expect that the difference between the mathematical brain and the non-mathematical brain would also be very large. It would not surprise me to find that it was even larger than the difference between the reading brain and the non-reading brain. I'd also be interested to know what happens to your brain when you become expert at playing a musical instrument, painting, or fixing machines. All of these are skills that have evolved over timespans comparable to that involved in developing reading, maybe even longer. Intuitively, it also changes you substantially to acquire them.
People must have studied these ideas, but I only thought of looking for relevant research now. I guess Maryanne Wolf's book is better than I first realised.
________________
I showed this review to o1, and it told me I might want to read Amalric and Dehaene's 2016 paper "Origins of the brain networks for advanced mathematics in expert mathematicians". Just downloaded it from Google Scholar: it does indeed look like an excellent recommendation.
August 28, 2014
I found the beginning of the book fascinating, offering new (to me) information about the beginning of written language, how it takes different forms depending on whether it is picture-like or not, noting differences between languages that were representative of sounds or of things. Fascinating stuff. It was news to me that Socrates railed against the spread of written language, believing that spreading a way for many people to gain knowledge would have a net negative effect on the ability of people to think and communicate. In a society in which knowledge was transmitted orally, strength of memory was paramount, and control of information thus very limited to the few who were both able and wealthy enough to spare the many years it took to memorize the knowledge of the realm.
But I found most of the book a bit too technical for me, even though it was written for a general audience. I expect it will be most valued by college and grad students of linguistics and brain sciences and by professionals who deal with reading disorders. Much of the latter sections of the book address specifics on what reading problems constitute dyslexia, how reading constraints originate in different brain parts depending on the sort of language one is attempting to master, and whether what we see as a negative might not actually be in some ways a positive. Wolf notes that many of the greatest minds in human history would have been diagnosed as dyslexic today. But the heavy reliance on the right brain that characterizes dyslexics manifests in increased creativity. How much is cause and how much is effect is unclear, but it is noteworthy that a problem with reading does not indicate anything about intelligence.
QUOTES
P 65
Try to imagine a situation in which the educated members of an oral culture had to depend entirely on personal memorization and meta-cognitive strategies to preserve their collective knowledge. Such strategies, however impressive, came with a cost. Sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, dependence on rhythm, memory, formulas, and strategy constrained what could be said, remembered, and created.
The alphabet and other writing systems did away with most of those constraints, thereby enlarging the boundaries of what could be thought and written by more people. But is this a unique contribution of the Greek alphabet, or is it the very act of writing that promotes new levels of thought for more people? If we look back almost a 1,000 years before the Greeks to the Ugaritic writing system. We can observe a good example of what an y alphabet-like system can do within a culture. If we look bask still earlier to Akkadian literature…we see an outpouring of thought…recorded by a nonalphabetic logosyllabary.
By taking a meta-view of this entire history, we can see that what promotes the development of intellectual thought in human history is not the first alphabet or even the best iteration of an alphabet but writing itself. 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. As humans learned to use written language more and more precisely to convey their thoughts, their capacity for abstract thought and novel ideas accelerated.
P 74
The unbridgeable differences that Socrates saw between spoken and written words in their different pedagogical and philosophical uses, in their ability to depict reality, and in their capacity to refine thought and virtue were mild in comparison with his concern for the changes literacy would bring to memory, and the individual’s internalization of knowledge. Socrates well knew that literacy could greatly increase cultural memory, but he didn’t want the consequences of the trade.
By committing to memory and examining huge amounts of orally transmitted material, young educated Greek citizens both preserved the extant cultural memory of their society and increased personal and societal knowledge. Unlike the judges at his trial, Socrates held this entire system in esteem not so much from a concern for preserving tradition as from the belief that only the arduous process of memorization was sufficiently rigorous to form the basis of a personal knowledge that could then be refined in dialogue with a teacher. From this larger interconnected view of language, memory, and knowledge, Socrates concluded that written language was not a “recipe� for memory, but a potential agent of its destruction. Preserving the individual’s memory and its role in the examination and embodiment of knowledge was more important than the indisputable advantages of writing in preserving cultural memory.
P 158
Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.
P 213
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 ans synchronize soccer moves and symphonic movements.
P 217
The new circuits and pathways that the brain fashions in order to read become the foundation for being able to think in different, innovative ways.
The reading revolution, therefore, was both neuronally and culturally based, and it began with the emergence of the first comprehensive writing systems, not the first alphabet. The increased efficiency of writing and the memory it freed contributed to new forms of thought, and so did the neuronal systems set up to read. New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read; the increasingly sophisticated intellectual skills promoted by reading and writing added to our intellectual repertoire, and continue to add to it.
P 220
…Socrates worries were not so much about literacy as about what might happen to knowledge if the young had unguided, uncritical access to information. For Socrates, the search for real knowledge did not revolve around information. Rather, it was about finding the essence and purpose of life. Such a search required a lifelong commitment to developing the deepest critical and analytical skills, and to internalizing personal knowledge through the prodigious use of memory, and long effort. Only these conditions assured Socrates that a student was capable of moving from exploring knowledge in dialogue with a teacher to a path of principles that lead to action, virtue, and ultimately to a “friendship with his god.� Socrates saw knowledge as a force for the higher good; anything—such as literacy—that might endanger it was anathema.
P 221
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 unconsciousness?
But I found most of the book a bit too technical for me, even though it was written for a general audience. I expect it will be most valued by college and grad students of linguistics and brain sciences and by professionals who deal with reading disorders. Much of the latter sections of the book address specifics on what reading problems constitute dyslexia, how reading constraints originate in different brain parts depending on the sort of language one is attempting to master, and whether what we see as a negative might not actually be in some ways a positive. Wolf notes that many of the greatest minds in human history would have been diagnosed as dyslexic today. But the heavy reliance on the right brain that characterizes dyslexics manifests in increased creativity. How much is cause and how much is effect is unclear, but it is noteworthy that a problem with reading does not indicate anything about intelligence.
QUOTES
P 65
Try to imagine a situation in which the educated members of an oral culture had to depend entirely on personal memorization and meta-cognitive strategies to preserve their collective knowledge. Such strategies, however impressive, came with a cost. Sometimes subtly, sometimes blatantly, dependence on rhythm, memory, formulas, and strategy constrained what could be said, remembered, and created.
The alphabet and other writing systems did away with most of those constraints, thereby enlarging the boundaries of what could be thought and written by more people. But is this a unique contribution of the Greek alphabet, or is it the very act of writing that promotes new levels of thought for more people? If we look back almost a 1,000 years before the Greeks to the Ugaritic writing system. We can observe a good example of what an y alphabet-like system can do within a culture. If we look bask still earlier to Akkadian literature…we see an outpouring of thought…recorded by a nonalphabetic logosyllabary.
By taking a meta-view of this entire history, we can see that what promotes the development of intellectual thought in human history is not the first alphabet or even the best iteration of an alphabet but writing itself. 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. As humans learned to use written language more and more precisely to convey their thoughts, their capacity for abstract thought and novel ideas accelerated.
P 74
The unbridgeable differences that Socrates saw between spoken and written words in their different pedagogical and philosophical uses, in their ability to depict reality, and in their capacity to refine thought and virtue were mild in comparison with his concern for the changes literacy would bring to memory, and the individual’s internalization of knowledge. Socrates well knew that literacy could greatly increase cultural memory, but he didn’t want the consequences of the trade.
By committing to memory and examining huge amounts of orally transmitted material, young educated Greek citizens both preserved the extant cultural memory of their society and increased personal and societal knowledge. Unlike the judges at his trial, Socrates held this entire system in esteem not so much from a concern for preserving tradition as from the belief that only the arduous process of memorization was sufficiently rigorous to form the basis of a personal knowledge that could then be refined in dialogue with a teacher. From this larger interconnected view of language, memory, and knowledge, Socrates concluded that written language was not a “recipe� for memory, but a potential agent of its destruction. Preserving the individual’s memory and its role in the examination and embodiment of knowledge was more important than the indisputable advantages of writing in preserving cultural memory.
P 158
Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.
P 213
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 ans synchronize soccer moves and symphonic movements.
P 217
The new circuits and pathways that the brain fashions in order to read become the foundation for being able to think in different, innovative ways.
The reading revolution, therefore, was both neuronally and culturally based, and it began with the emergence of the first comprehensive writing systems, not the first alphabet. The increased efficiency of writing and the memory it freed contributed to new forms of thought, and so did the neuronal systems set up to read. New thought came more readily to a brain that had already learned how to rearrange itself to read; the increasingly sophisticated intellectual skills promoted by reading and writing added to our intellectual repertoire, and continue to add to it.
P 220
…Socrates worries were not so much about literacy as about what might happen to knowledge if the young had unguided, uncritical access to information. For Socrates, the search for real knowledge did not revolve around information. Rather, it was about finding the essence and purpose of life. Such a search required a lifelong commitment to developing the deepest critical and analytical skills, and to internalizing personal knowledge through the prodigious use of memory, and long effort. Only these conditions assured Socrates that a student was capable of moving from exploring knowledge in dialogue with a teacher to a path of principles that lead to action, virtue, and ultimately to a “friendship with his god.� Socrates saw knowledge as a force for the higher good; anything—such as literacy—that might endanger it was anathema.
P 221
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 unconsciousness?
January 5, 2021
This book had been written quite a while ago; I probably heard about it because it was recently translated into Russian. While it's generally an account of a very interesting topic, it is not extremely engaging, either in its first part, where the history and neurobiology of reading are discussed, or in the second, when the author switches to the problems of a dyslexic brain (which is personal: one of her children is dyslexic; there is probably a family history, though what she relates is more like a family legend). There are some glaring mistakes in the text, such as calling Korney Chukovsky a 'scholar' or mentioning, in passing, 'Indo-European languages from Etruscan to Turkish.'
This said, the book made me think about certain things which, I am absolutely sure, have been discussed a lot, but for me they, somewhat tangentially to the subject of the book, were a relative novelty. One of them is the presence of audiobooks, their popularity, and the reliance of many people to them; another, recently expressed by Anatoly Vorobey, is the popularity of all things audio-visual, like podcasts, which quite often (more often than not) can be compressed into text without any loss of information. I simply cannot use that. I know that many people are listening to audiobooks with increased speed; for me, that kind of defeats the purpose: if a book is read well, the actor must have been really trying; listening to the results of her or his work at a different speed completely ruins the efforts. Moreover, how much can you speed up a spoken text? Twice? (I'm not even sure that twice wouldn't be too much.) Reading is infinitely faster anyway.
So why? Why are people spending much more time for getting the same information? (I would also argue that the uptake of content is much worse, quality-wise; but stay tuned.) Faced with the very simple and very obvious idea that reading is an extremely recent novelty in our life, which has no basis whatsoever in our brain structure, the answer seems obvious: because most people have not actually learned to read. Whenever they are given a chance to switch back to previous modes of communication, which are biologically native to us (like speaking and listening; while the brain is still essentially the black box, it is obvious that language is innate, that our species was endowed with the ability to use this tool, like walking upright), they do so, ditching the reading ability and coming back to it only when it is absolutely necessary. After all, we have all seen the situation with the 'most reading country in the world' once new mass media became available.
I would argue that the number of 'readers' does not equal the number of 'non-dyslexic individuals,' which seems to be something like 80�90%; I would argue that in percentage points, there are approximately as many readers now as in the Middle Ages, with the obvious qualification that today's readers can include those who had never been able to become one for social or even biological (being a woman; there were nunneries, though) reasons.
Which brings me to another point: how versatile is the brain? What other tools does it have under its hood we are not (yet) acquainted with? There are many specialized tasks which have always been like that, perhaps even during the prehistoric times, which is basically the bulk of our species's existence; we can basically neglect the last 5,000 years or so (the 'reading time'), because biologically it is nothing. (An aside: if we take a Homo sapiens baby born 80,000 years ago, would his or her reading abilities be absolutely the same, given s/he is not dyslexic? Or would the percentage of dyslexic individuals be substantially greater back then?) For example, music is one such skill; there are various degrees of musical education, but I think that it's a minority skill in any culture (if we take into account the necessity to learn a separate notation system etc.). Or typing. But then, if we take driving, for example, there are cultures (like much of the US) where this skill is absolutely universal. And yet, there is nothing in the brain that prepares us for it. It is like reading. Or using a smartphone: note the finger movements of old people using smartphones; they are not as natural as those of young people who kind of grew up with them or at least accepted them fully. There will be probably more of that as we grow older and see younger generations develop brain functions that we lack.
All in all, it is a fascinating subject. We in Russia tend to forget how unusual the skill of reading is because the post-1917 literacy campaign was mass-scale and very successful. At the beginning of this century, I was interviewing some old villagers from Bosnia, who were born before Tito's time, and was surprised to find out that they were virtually illiterate. This ability is very new and somewhat fragile; and the development of today's mass media (starting from the early 20th century) has reversed the trend: people no longer need to read. We will probably see more of that in the future.
This said, the book made me think about certain things which, I am absolutely sure, have been discussed a lot, but for me they, somewhat tangentially to the subject of the book, were a relative novelty. One of them is the presence of audiobooks, their popularity, and the reliance of many people to them; another, recently expressed by Anatoly Vorobey, is the popularity of all things audio-visual, like podcasts, which quite often (more often than not) can be compressed into text without any loss of information. I simply cannot use that. I know that many people are listening to audiobooks with increased speed; for me, that kind of defeats the purpose: if a book is read well, the actor must have been really trying; listening to the results of her or his work at a different speed completely ruins the efforts. Moreover, how much can you speed up a spoken text? Twice? (I'm not even sure that twice wouldn't be too much.) Reading is infinitely faster anyway.
So why? Why are people spending much more time for getting the same information? (I would also argue that the uptake of content is much worse, quality-wise; but stay tuned.) Faced with the very simple and very obvious idea that reading is an extremely recent novelty in our life, which has no basis whatsoever in our brain structure, the answer seems obvious: because most people have not actually learned to read. Whenever they are given a chance to switch back to previous modes of communication, which are biologically native to us (like speaking and listening; while the brain is still essentially the black box, it is obvious that language is innate, that our species was endowed with the ability to use this tool, like walking upright), they do so, ditching the reading ability and coming back to it only when it is absolutely necessary. After all, we have all seen the situation with the 'most reading country in the world' once new mass media became available.
I would argue that the number of 'readers' does not equal the number of 'non-dyslexic individuals,' which seems to be something like 80�90%; I would argue that in percentage points, there are approximately as many readers now as in the Middle Ages, with the obvious qualification that today's readers can include those who had never been able to become one for social or even biological (being a woman; there were nunneries, though) reasons.
Which brings me to another point: how versatile is the brain? What other tools does it have under its hood we are not (yet) acquainted with? There are many specialized tasks which have always been like that, perhaps even during the prehistoric times, which is basically the bulk of our species's existence; we can basically neglect the last 5,000 years or so (the 'reading time'), because biologically it is nothing. (An aside: if we take a Homo sapiens baby born 80,000 years ago, would his or her reading abilities be absolutely the same, given s/he is not dyslexic? Or would the percentage of dyslexic individuals be substantially greater back then?) For example, music is one such skill; there are various degrees of musical education, but I think that it's a minority skill in any culture (if we take into account the necessity to learn a separate notation system etc.). Or typing. But then, if we take driving, for example, there are cultures (like much of the US) where this skill is absolutely universal. And yet, there is nothing in the brain that prepares us for it. It is like reading. Or using a smartphone: note the finger movements of old people using smartphones; they are not as natural as those of young people who kind of grew up with them or at least accepted them fully. There will be probably more of that as we grow older and see younger generations develop brain functions that we lack.
All in all, it is a fascinating subject. We in Russia tend to forget how unusual the skill of reading is because the post-1917 literacy campaign was mass-scale and very successful. At the beginning of this century, I was interviewing some old villagers from Bosnia, who were born before Tito's time, and was surprised to find out that they were virtually illiterate. This ability is very new and somewhat fragile; and the development of today's mass media (starting from the early 20th century) has reversed the trend: people no longer need to read. We will probably see more of that in the future.
July 17, 2019
As you might have noticed if you follow my reviews, I read a fair bit. It was therefore fascinating to get an insight into what my brain does as it devours books. ‘Proust and the Squid� provides an impressively clear explanation of neuroscientific research on this front, as well as a brief history of reading. Wolf discusses recent findings enthusiastically, while showing how much is still unknown and/or disputed. I was delighted to learn how human beings learn to read, a skill that repurposes parts of our brains that certainly didn’t evolve for this. Wolf also explains the various ways in which that learning can be impeded, which vary according to language. I’d never thought of this before, but of course different types of languages require slightly different neural paths:
Reading becomes an automatic skill as the brain forms shortcuts to perform the various tasks involved more quickly. Perhaps my favourite part of the book was a detailed breakdown of each step and where in the brain is activated at each point, a subsection titled ‘Every word has 500 milliseconds of fame�. Also notable are the theories of dyslexia, a problem that of course did not exist until reading became widespread. Just as the brain pathways required to read vary by language, so does the nature of dyslexia:
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of reading’s early history, including hieroglyphics and the invention of the Greek alphabet, with current research. This emphasises the complexity and variability of reading across time and geography in a relatively short book. Although the style is accessible and breaks down complex concepts for the non-scientist, you can tell Wolf is an academic because the whole thing is so well-structured. (I often notice the difference in structural rigour between non-fiction by academics and journalists.) The concluding chapter raises questions and concerns about the transition to more digital reading, which I gather are considered in Wolf’s more recent book . I’m curious to read that too, of course. ‘Proust and the Squid� was first published in 2008, so it’ll be interesting to see how research has advanced since.
Finally, I think this book would be of particular interest to parents, as it explains in detail the stages a child goes through when learning to read. This provides useful guidance on how to support their learning, which also helpfully informs my choice of books to buy for friends babies as they get older. Rhyming poetry looks like a particularly good option.
Japanese readers offer a particularly interesting example because each reader’s brain must learn two very different writing systems: one of these is a very efficient syllabary (kana) used especially for foreign words, names of cities, names of persons, and newer words in Japanese; and the second is an older Chinese-influenced logographic script (kanji). When reading kanji, Japanese readers use pathways similar to those of the Chinese; when reading kana, they use pathways much more similar to alphabet readers. In other words, not only are different pathways utilised by readers of Chinese and English, but different routes can be used within the same brain for reading different types of scripts. And because of the brain’s prodigious ability to adapt its design, the reader can become efficient in each language.
Reading becomes an automatic skill as the brain forms shortcuts to perform the various tasks involved more quickly. Perhaps my favourite part of the book was a detailed breakdown of each step and where in the brain is activated at each point, a subsection titled ‘Every word has 500 milliseconds of fame�. Also notable are the theories of dyslexia, a problem that of course did not exist until reading became widespread. Just as the brain pathways required to read vary by language, so does the nature of dyslexia:
Depending on what is emphasised in any given language (fluency in German; visual spatial memory in Chinese; phonological skills in English), there will somewhat different faces of dyslexia, as well as different predictors of reading failure. …] Among Spanish speakers, researchers in Madrid found sub-types similar to our double deficit [naming speed and phoneme awareness] classification, with one striking difference: comprehension among the most affected subtype appeared far less impaired in Spanish readers with dyslexia than in English readers with dyslexia. Similar data emerged for Hebrew. …] It appears that the shorter time needed for decoding in these languages allows more time for comprehension than in English.
…]
When phonological skills play a more significant role in reading acquisition, as they do in less regular languages like English and French, phoneme awareness and decoding accuracy are often very deficient � and are good predictors of dyslexia. When these skills play a less dominant role in reading (in the transparent orthographies like German, and the more logographic writing systems), processing speed becomes the stronger diagnostic predictor of reading performance, and reading fluency and comprehension issues dominate the profile of dyslexia. In these more transparent languages � Spanish, German, Finnish, Dutch, Greek, and Italian � the child with dyslexia exhibits fewer problems decoding words and more problems reading connected text fluently with good comprehension.
I enjoyed the juxtaposition of reading’s early history, including hieroglyphics and the invention of the Greek alphabet, with current research. This emphasises the complexity and variability of reading across time and geography in a relatively short book. Although the style is accessible and breaks down complex concepts for the non-scientist, you can tell Wolf is an academic because the whole thing is so well-structured. (I often notice the difference in structural rigour between non-fiction by academics and journalists.) The concluding chapter raises questions and concerns about the transition to more digital reading, which I gather are considered in Wolf’s more recent book . I’m curious to read that too, of course. ‘Proust and the Squid� was first published in 2008, so it’ll be interesting to see how research has advanced since.
Finally, I think this book would be of particular interest to parents, as it explains in detail the stages a child goes through when learning to read. This provides useful guidance on how to support their learning, which also helpfully informs my choice of books to buy for friends babies as they get older. Rhyming poetry looks like a particularly good option.
April 8, 2024
'Proust and the squid' was voor mij een stevige historisch-wetenschappelijke, maar gelukkig ook een bevlogen en doorleefde portie 'leeswijsheid'. Na een interview in DeStandaard met de Amerikaanse neurologe Maryanne Wolf over haar recent verschenen boek , waarin ze o.a. haar bezorgdheid uit over hoe de beeldenstorm aan gedigitaliseerde informatie de voordelen van het lezen voor ons denken en onze empathie bedreigt, wilde ik haar beide boeken lezen. In mijn huidige nieuwe job als mentor van een nieuwe secundaire Freinetschool en is dat thema me immers nog nauwer aan het hart gaan liggen.
Wolf werkt haar wetenschappelijk verhaal over ons leesbrein uit in drie op elkaar voortbouwende delen. In het eerste, historisch opgevatte deel toont ze aan wanneer en in welke fasen de mensheid zich het schrift en het lezen eigen maakte en daarmee de bedrading van ons brein en onze manier van denken revolutionair veranderde. Wat ik al meteen leerde was het feit dat er niet zoiets als een lees-gen bestaat, m.a.w. dat een kind uit de 21e eeuw het net zo goed vanaf nul moet leren als een Summerisch of Oud-Grieks kind dat ooit moest doen. En dat de geschreven vorm van talen een meervoudige evolutie kent die van bij het begin onvermijdelijk verstrengeld was met de manier waarop het lezen ervan het best werd gestructureerd, georganiseerd en aangeleerd.
In deel twee ligt de klemtoon op die voor ons brein complexe activiteit die lezen behelst. Wolf gaat diep in op hoe kinderen leren lezen, wat dat in hun hersenen teweegbrengt en welke vroege factoren het succes daarvan kunnen aanwakkeren. Omdat ik ooit, als beginnende leraar, voor een eerste leerjaar heb gestaan, herkende ik heel wat elementen in dat moeizame, maar o zo wonderlijke leerproces. In dit hoofdstuk vond Maryanne Wolf ook de ideale balans tussen stevige wetenschap en empathische bevlogenheid.
Het taaiste hoofdstuk, zeker op neurologisch vlak, was zonder meer het laatste. Hierin schetst en ontsluit Wolf het wereldwijde onderzoek naar dyslexie dat al ongeveer een eeuw evolueert met voortschrijdend inzicht. Dyslexie bestaat blijkbaar al zo lang als er gelezen wordt. Het wordt bepaald door erfelijke factoren die echter niet tot een eenduidig scenario leiden. Behalve dat er verschillen zijn per moedertaal, blijkt vooral dat er heel wat neurologische variaties bestaan. De auteur, zelf erfelijk belast met dyslexie, maakt echter vooral duidelijk dat dyslexie niet als stigma mag gebruikt worden. Integendeel. De onorthodoxe bedrading van het brein van een dyslecticus zorgt voor andere, niet minder boeiende kwaliteiten. Beroemde (vermoede) dyslectici zijn bv. Da Vinci, Einstein, Gaudi & Picasso.
Kortom: dit boek was het soms taaie studie- en leeswerk absoluut waard ... maar voor ik aan begin, toch maar eerst even wat malsere literatuur uit mijn leesstapel kiezen die mijn lezersbrein iets minder op de proef stellen.
Wolf werkt haar wetenschappelijk verhaal over ons leesbrein uit in drie op elkaar voortbouwende delen. In het eerste, historisch opgevatte deel toont ze aan wanneer en in welke fasen de mensheid zich het schrift en het lezen eigen maakte en daarmee de bedrading van ons brein en onze manier van denken revolutionair veranderde. Wat ik al meteen leerde was het feit dat er niet zoiets als een lees-gen bestaat, m.a.w. dat een kind uit de 21e eeuw het net zo goed vanaf nul moet leren als een Summerisch of Oud-Grieks kind dat ooit moest doen. En dat de geschreven vorm van talen een meervoudige evolutie kent die van bij het begin onvermijdelijk verstrengeld was met de manier waarop het lezen ervan het best werd gestructureerd, georganiseerd en aangeleerd.
In deel twee ligt de klemtoon op die voor ons brein complexe activiteit die lezen behelst. Wolf gaat diep in op hoe kinderen leren lezen, wat dat in hun hersenen teweegbrengt en welke vroege factoren het succes daarvan kunnen aanwakkeren. Omdat ik ooit, als beginnende leraar, voor een eerste leerjaar heb gestaan, herkende ik heel wat elementen in dat moeizame, maar o zo wonderlijke leerproces. In dit hoofdstuk vond Maryanne Wolf ook de ideale balans tussen stevige wetenschap en empathische bevlogenheid.
Het taaiste hoofdstuk, zeker op neurologisch vlak, was zonder meer het laatste. Hierin schetst en ontsluit Wolf het wereldwijde onderzoek naar dyslexie dat al ongeveer een eeuw evolueert met voortschrijdend inzicht. Dyslexie bestaat blijkbaar al zo lang als er gelezen wordt. Het wordt bepaald door erfelijke factoren die echter niet tot een eenduidig scenario leiden. Behalve dat er verschillen zijn per moedertaal, blijkt vooral dat er heel wat neurologische variaties bestaan. De auteur, zelf erfelijk belast met dyslexie, maakt echter vooral duidelijk dat dyslexie niet als stigma mag gebruikt worden. Integendeel. De onorthodoxe bedrading van het brein van een dyslecticus zorgt voor andere, niet minder boeiende kwaliteiten. Beroemde (vermoede) dyslectici zijn bv. Da Vinci, Einstein, Gaudi & Picasso.
Kortom: dit boek was het soms taaie studie- en leeswerk absoluut waard ... maar voor ik aan begin, toch maar eerst even wat malsere literatuur uit mijn leesstapel kiezen die mijn lezersbrein iets minder op de proef stellen.
March 3, 2010
*Weak*, dude.
A handful of reviewers here mentioned that Wolf's writing is too difficult and technical for layfolk. On the other hand, the writing wasn't research-based enough; one reviewer mentioned that Wolf "seemed more interested in linguistics lite rather than delving into the brain processes". I agree on both counts, though the latter was the one that stuck out to me. Wolf's writing isn't good enough to stand alone without knowing her audience.
I would have liked either a good, widely accessible synthesis for layfolk or a new or more intricate, *heavily research focused and cited* explanation or exploration for people who are professionally involved in language and literacy. I've spent years in reading/language development classes getting two degrees related to the "science of the reading brain", which I think increases, not reduces, my opportunities for enjoying any purposeful angle on the subject. Wolf hardly threw me a bone.
general pros:
+ An interesting job of responding to the claim that alphabets are superior to other writing systems
+ Ideas about dyslexia
general cons:
- Far too often she'd say "the brain shows" without citing a particular study
- The pictures and diagrams were crude
- I thought the title held such promise, but halfway through the book I felt taken in by a gimmick
There was one part where she mentions a forthcoming study from Tufts (her uni) about the phonemic differences between Standard American English (SAE) and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and how they hypothesize the differences in AAVE make it harder for kids speaking AAVE to learn to read. I really wonder about the assumptions behind this -- think about all the different, whacked out phonemic dialectical differences in Britain, for example. No one is saying that those Brits can't learn to read because of it. There seems to be an assumption that SAE has some magical phoneme-grapheme correspondence that other dialects don't have, which I think is just silly. I'm ready for her to prove me wrong ... as long as she can hand me the evidence.
This book made me crazy.
A handful of reviewers here mentioned that Wolf's writing is too difficult and technical for layfolk. On the other hand, the writing wasn't research-based enough; one reviewer mentioned that Wolf "seemed more interested in linguistics lite rather than delving into the brain processes". I agree on both counts, though the latter was the one that stuck out to me. Wolf's writing isn't good enough to stand alone without knowing her audience.
I would have liked either a good, widely accessible synthesis for layfolk or a new or more intricate, *heavily research focused and cited* explanation or exploration for people who are professionally involved in language and literacy. I've spent years in reading/language development classes getting two degrees related to the "science of the reading brain", which I think increases, not reduces, my opportunities for enjoying any purposeful angle on the subject. Wolf hardly threw me a bone.
general pros:
+ An interesting job of responding to the claim that alphabets are superior to other writing systems
+ Ideas about dyslexia
general cons:
- Far too often she'd say "the brain shows" without citing a particular study
- The pictures and diagrams were crude
- I thought the title held such promise, but halfway through the book I felt taken in by a gimmick
There was one part where she mentions a forthcoming study from Tufts (her uni) about the phonemic differences between Standard American English (SAE) and African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) and how they hypothesize the differences in AAVE make it harder for kids speaking AAVE to learn to read. I really wonder about the assumptions behind this -- think about all the different, whacked out phonemic dialectical differences in Britain, for example. No one is saying that those Brits can't learn to read because of it. There seems to be an assumption that SAE has some magical phoneme-grapheme correspondence that other dialects don't have, which I think is just silly. I'm ready for her to prove me wrong ... as long as she can hand me the evidence.
This book made me crazy.
January 4, 2012
This is an interesting book, organized in three sections. In the first section, Maryanne Wolf describes how the human race developed reading (and writing, of course). Symbols denoting words evolved into symbols denoting syllables and then individual sounds, as letters. As Wolf reiterates, this evolution took 2,000 years, yet a child learns to read in 2,000 days. The development of an alphabet was a strikingly innovative concept. Scholars do not agree on the definition of an alphabet, and by some definitions, Hebrew does not have an alphabet, as it has no letters for vowel sounds.
The second section describes how children learn to read. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different aspects of reading. Reading different languages puts different demands on the brain. Brain scans show that readers of Chinese use different parts of the brain than do readers of English.
The third section describes the various types of dyslexia. Many seriously creative people probably had dyslexia to some degree; Leonardo da Vinci, Auguste Rodin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Charles Schwabb, and many others.
As other authors mention as well, Wolf discusses in some detail the reasons why Socrates was so strongly opposed to the "new" invention of writing. Wolf shows that since writing was still so new in Socrates' time, he did not yet fully grasp the positive consequences of reading. The main consequence, according to Wolf, begins to be appreciated after reading becomes a semi-automatic skill. Then the reader has time, while reading, to "go beyond" the text, and think about the unwritten meanings.
The second section describes how children learn to read. Different parts of the brain are responsible for different aspects of reading. Reading different languages puts different demands on the brain. Brain scans show that readers of Chinese use different parts of the brain than do readers of English.
The third section describes the various types of dyslexia. Many seriously creative people probably had dyslexia to some degree; Leonardo da Vinci, Auguste Rodin, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Charles Schwabb, and many others.
As other authors mention as well, Wolf discusses in some detail the reasons why Socrates was so strongly opposed to the "new" invention of writing. Wolf shows that since writing was still so new in Socrates' time, he did not yet fully grasp the positive consequences of reading. The main consequence, according to Wolf, begins to be appreciated after reading becomes a semi-automatic skill. Then the reader has time, while reading, to "go beyond" the text, and think about the unwritten meanings.
August 1, 2015
"My major conclusion from an examination of the developing reader is a cautionary one. I fear that many of our children are in danger of becoming just what Socrates warned us against - a society of decoders of information, whose false sense of knowing distracts them from a deeper development of their intellectual potential. It does not need to be so, if we teach them well..." p.226
"Socrates feared above all else that the 'semblance of truth,' conveyed by the seeming permanence of this written language, would lead to the end of the search for true knowledge, and that this loss would mean the death of human virtue as we know it. Socrates never knew the secret at the heart of reading: the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before. Proust knew this secret, and we do. The mysterious, invisible gift of 'time to think beyond' is the reading brain's greatest achievement... p. 229
"Socrates feared above all else that the 'semblance of truth,' conveyed by the seeming permanence of this written language, would lead to the end of the search for true knowledge, and that this loss would mean the death of human virtue as we know it. Socrates never knew the secret at the heart of reading: the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before. Proust knew this secret, and we do. The mysterious, invisible gift of 'time to think beyond' is the reading brain's greatest achievement... p. 229
August 14, 2019
98th book for 2019.
As a parent—albeit with a background in psychology—I found this a pretty helpful book to orientate myself on what to expect as my proto-reader four-year-old daughter takes her first tentative steps towards reading.
What's amazing about reading, at least from a neuropsychological perspective, is that it's not a evolutionary evolved aspect of the brain; unlike say grasping for coffee cup or recognizing a face or talking to a friend. There is no "reading center" in the brain. Reading is a neural kludge, something that needs to be learned, where literally different parts of the brain have to be linked together in a very specific fashion for it work; strikingly different types of reading (e.g., Chinese characters versus phonetic letters) give rise to different wiring/activation patterns in the brain. For at least 99% of the history of Homo Sapiens no human brain could read. It's therefore not surprising that a significant proportion of the population have difficultly learning his non-natural skill.
Her advice to parents is non-controversial: before about five years is too early for the brains of most children to learn to read; reading lots of books to children show a positive correlation to child reading skills later; basically good language skills by the child pre-reading, equates to good reading skills later. But as she emphasizes throughout the book, the skill of reading is not something at happens all at once. It's something to develop and cultivate throughout life.
3-stars.
As a parent—albeit with a background in psychology—I found this a pretty helpful book to orientate myself on what to expect as my proto-reader four-year-old daughter takes her first tentative steps towards reading.
What's amazing about reading, at least from a neuropsychological perspective, is that it's not a evolutionary evolved aspect of the brain; unlike say grasping for coffee cup or recognizing a face or talking to a friend. There is no "reading center" in the brain. Reading is a neural kludge, something that needs to be learned, where literally different parts of the brain have to be linked together in a very specific fashion for it work; strikingly different types of reading (e.g., Chinese characters versus phonetic letters) give rise to different wiring/activation patterns in the brain. For at least 99% of the history of Homo Sapiens no human brain could read. It's therefore not surprising that a significant proportion of the population have difficultly learning his non-natural skill.
Her advice to parents is non-controversial: before about five years is too early for the brains of most children to learn to read; reading lots of books to children show a positive correlation to child reading skills later; basically good language skills by the child pre-reading, equates to good reading skills later. But as she emphasizes throughout the book, the skill of reading is not something at happens all at once. It's something to develop and cultivate throughout life.
3-stars.
March 18, 2021
Summary: This book is great. There are a lot of haters. Those people likely have reading problems (argument supported below). Well done Wolf. I caught only 1 thing that I blanched at briefly.
Most of the arguments against this book have to do with people who felt stupid, while reading it. One person failed to even read the subtitle and chided Wolf on the book having nothing to do with Proust and the Squid. Others felt the book to be too technical. It's rather technical, but perfect for what I'm researching. A third set, wrote reviews saying they were upset about Socrates and his hatred of reading. Too bad, they failed at basic reading comprehension. Wolf actually does not agree with Socrates, so your review only highlight your inability to read, not any issues with Wolf as an author.
Ok.... now that I've gotten that out of the way, the book is pretty great, particularly for what I'm researching. I like that she describes the history of language, but what many people missed is why she's talking about it. The idea is that if the brain is rewiring, what precisely is it rewiring to do. This is a real question that gets missed. You are essentially accessing meaning by letters. It's weird. That's why all the other pictorial languages are relevant. Incidentally, that's also why the history of what people were originally trying to do is also relevant. If you understand that point and then read her history it will make more sense how all that fits in with the Reading Brain subtitle.
P. 54 - Cognitive efficiency depends on the third feature of the brain: the ability of its specialized regions to reach a speed that is almost automatic. The implications of cognitive automaticity for human intellectual development are potentially staggering. If we can recognize symbols at almost automatic speeds, we can allocate more time to mental processes that are continuously expanding when we read and write.
BRAVO and wow! That my friends is her point and this is what reading has the potential to do. But so long as people hate this activity, it cannot do it. (We are so simpatico here and this is why I'm creating hte course that i'm focused on in speed reading.)
P.98 One of the more intriguing questions about children's first writing is whether or not they can read it. In fact, most children are hard-pressed to read back what they have written, but oh, do they want to.
Awesome. I need this fact and it confirms something I've been curious about. I mean if we are teaching much of the skills of reading indirectly through writing then how stupid are we - as a society to teach it this way?
P. 124 - this is the section on the idea that multiple meanings enhance comprehension. There are other works that suggest as many as 12 engagements with a word are required for the word to become in one's lexicon. Here I think she's speaking to the idea that you really don't know until you really appreciate the meaning.
P. 128 - Here it's letters as patterns. It's often forgotten that reading is a specific type of pattern recognition function.
P. 142 - After we know a word very well, we no longer need to analyze it in a labor-intensive way. Our stored letter pattern and word representations, particularly in the left hemisphere, activate a faster system.
P. 146-7 The role of memory in reading. Basically we use a combination. "Working memory ... is our cognitive blackboard or scratch pad. Key to expert reading, working memory ensures that we can keep the initial visual identification of a word in mind long enough o add the rest of the information about the word (such as meaning and grammatical use).
When fluent readers identify a string of words, particularly one with considerable semantic and grammatical information, they use both working memory and associative memory. The later helps us recall information that has been stored long-term ...
P. 148 - One brilliant design feature of our eyes allows us to see "ahead" into a parafoveal region and still farther along the line of text into the peripheral region. 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.
Because we have foveal and parafoveal information, we always have a preview of what lies ahead. The preview then becomes - milliseconds later - easier to recognize, contributing further to our automaticity.
My belief, without having the extensive science of Wolf is that Speed readers have access to both left and right. Also, they are not just taking in information on words, but also grammar in a way that allows the parafoveal to act a bit differently. Still.... cool.
P. 153 - How fast we read any word is greatly influenced by the quality and quantity of the semantic knowledge we have that is activated along with the words.
P. 154 - The more we know about the underlying life of a word, the more cumulative and convergent the contributions from different brain areas are, and the better and faster we read that word.
P. 160 - The Dynamic interaction between text and life experiences is bidirectional: we bring our life experiences to the text, and the text changes our life experiences.
P. 191... I didn't totally understand.... it had to do with the way in which different cross- languages have different types of language breakdowns. Can't tell if what she's saying is that reading issues are different or more prevalent in some languages. They do not affect others. I have mixed feelings on this because I writing was created thing, not the brain. My point is kind of this... colorblind is a problem seeing color, which is a gift for those that have a mechanical difficulty. For people with this issue, they have to figure out the work arounds to seeing color. It's the same I think with certain types of language disorders, so you are actually teaching the work arounds.... I think.... or rather I think this is what she is trying to say.
P. 219 She quotes a cultural historian Walter Ong. The gist of the quote is the idea that writing touches the psyche in a way that is rather unique. He ends this long quote with "Writing is culture raising."
P. 223 - This is the Matthew effect, i.e. the virtuous cycle of reading. "First, the idea acquisition of reading is based on the development of ....[reading skills]... 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 "whats in a word" helps you read it better; reading a word deepens your understanding of its place in the continuum of knowledge. This is the dynamic relationship between the brain's contribution to reading and reading's contribution to the brain's cognitive capacities.
So in empathy with the many that found it technical it is. This book was written by an academic and not dumbed down. I loved it. If you felt that way, I'd encourage reading around the topic and coming back to appreciate what Wolf is saying.
Most of the arguments against this book have to do with people who felt stupid, while reading it. One person failed to even read the subtitle and chided Wolf on the book having nothing to do with Proust and the Squid. Others felt the book to be too technical. It's rather technical, but perfect for what I'm researching. A third set, wrote reviews saying they were upset about Socrates and his hatred of reading. Too bad, they failed at basic reading comprehension. Wolf actually does not agree with Socrates, so your review only highlight your inability to read, not any issues with Wolf as an author.
Ok.... now that I've gotten that out of the way, the book is pretty great, particularly for what I'm researching. I like that she describes the history of language, but what many people missed is why she's talking about it. The idea is that if the brain is rewiring, what precisely is it rewiring to do. This is a real question that gets missed. You are essentially accessing meaning by letters. It's weird. That's why all the other pictorial languages are relevant. Incidentally, that's also why the history of what people were originally trying to do is also relevant. If you understand that point and then read her history it will make more sense how all that fits in with the Reading Brain subtitle.
P. 54 - Cognitive efficiency depends on the third feature of the brain: the ability of its specialized regions to reach a speed that is almost automatic. The implications of cognitive automaticity for human intellectual development are potentially staggering. If we can recognize symbols at almost automatic speeds, we can allocate more time to mental processes that are continuously expanding when we read and write.
BRAVO and wow! That my friends is her point and this is what reading has the potential to do. But so long as people hate this activity, it cannot do it. (We are so simpatico here and this is why I'm creating hte course that i'm focused on in speed reading.)
P.98 One of the more intriguing questions about children's first writing is whether or not they can read it. In fact, most children are hard-pressed to read back what they have written, but oh, do they want to.
Awesome. I need this fact and it confirms something I've been curious about. I mean if we are teaching much of the skills of reading indirectly through writing then how stupid are we - as a society to teach it this way?
P. 124 - this is the section on the idea that multiple meanings enhance comprehension. There are other works that suggest as many as 12 engagements with a word are required for the word to become in one's lexicon. Here I think she's speaking to the idea that you really don't know until you really appreciate the meaning.
P. 128 - Here it's letters as patterns. It's often forgotten that reading is a specific type of pattern recognition function.
P. 142 - After we know a word very well, we no longer need to analyze it in a labor-intensive way. Our stored letter pattern and word representations, particularly in the left hemisphere, activate a faster system.
P. 146-7 The role of memory in reading. Basically we use a combination. "Working memory ... is our cognitive blackboard or scratch pad. Key to expert reading, working memory ensures that we can keep the initial visual identification of a word in mind long enough o add the rest of the information about the word (such as meaning and grammatical use).
When fluent readers identify a string of words, particularly one with considerable semantic and grammatical information, they use both working memory and associative memory. The later helps us recall information that has been stored long-term ...
P. 148 - One brilliant design feature of our eyes allows us to see "ahead" into a parafoveal region and still farther along the line of text into the peripheral region. 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.
Because we have foveal and parafoveal information, we always have a preview of what lies ahead. The preview then becomes - milliseconds later - easier to recognize, contributing further to our automaticity.
My belief, without having the extensive science of Wolf is that Speed readers have access to both left and right. Also, they are not just taking in information on words, but also grammar in a way that allows the parafoveal to act a bit differently. Still.... cool.
P. 153 - How fast we read any word is greatly influenced by the quality and quantity of the semantic knowledge we have that is activated along with the words.
P. 154 - The more we know about the underlying life of a word, the more cumulative and convergent the contributions from different brain areas are, and the better and faster we read that word.
P. 160 - The Dynamic interaction between text and life experiences is bidirectional: we bring our life experiences to the text, and the text changes our life experiences.
P. 191... I didn't totally understand.... it had to do with the way in which different cross- languages have different types of language breakdowns. Can't tell if what she's saying is that reading issues are different or more prevalent in some languages. They do not affect others. I have mixed feelings on this because I writing was created thing, not the brain. My point is kind of this... colorblind is a problem seeing color, which is a gift for those that have a mechanical difficulty. For people with this issue, they have to figure out the work arounds to seeing color. It's the same I think with certain types of language disorders, so you are actually teaching the work arounds.... I think.... or rather I think this is what she is trying to say.
P. 219 She quotes a cultural historian Walter Ong. The gist of the quote is the idea that writing touches the psyche in a way that is rather unique. He ends this long quote with "Writing is culture raising."
P. 223 - This is the Matthew effect, i.e. the virtuous cycle of reading. "First, the idea acquisition of reading is based on the development of ....[reading skills]... 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 "whats in a word" helps you read it better; reading a word deepens your understanding of its place in the continuum of knowledge. This is the dynamic relationship between the brain's contribution to reading and reading's contribution to the brain's cognitive capacities.
So in empathy with the many that found it technical it is. This book was written by an academic and not dumbed down. I loved it. If you felt that way, I'd encourage reading around the topic and coming back to appreciate what Wolf is saying.
January 20, 2023
Very informative.
January 31, 2024
Yes, here it is, only September, and I've finally finished "Proust and the Squid." What a magnificent book.
I learned so much about the miracle of reading, the many miracles involved from the perspective of neuroscience.
Also, I opened up my heart of compassion for those who are wired with dyslexia. Before reading this book, I had no idea that there were many forms of this problem, and many possible ways to remedy it.
As always, with this superb book, I've flagged many superb quotes. I'm going to LIKE or ADD them here on ŷ.
EARLIER
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, to everybody who's read "Proust and the Squid." I'm gonna be reading it. This was one of my wonderful presents today!
Hooray!
I learned so much about the miracle of reading, the many miracles involved from the perspective of neuroscience.
Also, I opened up my heart of compassion for those who are wired with dyslexia. Before reading this book, I had no idea that there were many forms of this problem, and many possible ways to remedy it.
As always, with this superb book, I've flagged many superb quotes. I'm going to LIKE or ADD them here on ŷ.
EARLIER
Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, to everybody who's read "Proust and the Squid." I'm gonna be reading it. This was one of my wonderful presents today!
Hooray!
May 30, 2019
We were never born to read. Then how did we learn to read? That’s what this book is all about. It’s not an easy read but definitely an interesting one. Read slowly and you will realise how important it is know how our brains acquired the skill of reading.
October 26, 2023
Exquisite book! It gets a bit technical in few places� but a very strong recommendation from me 👍
Audiobook version is brilliant and free of charge for Audible members 🤷♂�
Audiobook version is brilliant and free of charge for Audible members 🤷♂�
July 7, 2018
Despite the potentially fascinating premise (that subtitle!), this was duller than dishwater. It read like a meta-analysis of the current scientific literature. It was also very repetitive; the two main points (that reading is an act that the brain must learn by fusing together many unrelated areas and that the brains of people who read different languages use very different areas) were interesting, but repeated constantly and not really enough to carry a whole book. Sadly disappointing.
January 24, 2024
*3-3.5 stars. I was led to this book about the science of the reading brain by one of my favorite book reviewers for the Chicago Tribune, John Warner. He wrote an article that appeared in the paper on January 7 with the headline 'My 2024 resolution is to read fewer books.' Quite astonishing for a book reviewer, right? He goes on to say that he hopes that slowing down will give him time to read more deeply. "'Proust and the Squid' is an exploration of 'deep reading' from every aspect imaginable," Warner says.
No human being is born with the ability to read. That fact alone is pretty startling when you think about it. And something changes in our brains when the skill is learned, so it's pretty momentous. Did you know that Socrates was against writing and reading? He thought it would lessen critical thought that comes from verbal discussions. Maryanne Wolf is equally concerned about what the digital age of instant information will do to developing brains. Will it decrease critical thought if information is swallowed whole without critical thought to its validity?
Quite an interesting book with lots of scientific detail. A little heavy going for the casual reader like me because of that.
No human being is born with the ability to read. That fact alone is pretty startling when you think about it. And something changes in our brains when the skill is learned, so it's pretty momentous. Did you know that Socrates was against writing and reading? He thought it would lessen critical thought that comes from verbal discussions. Maryanne Wolf is equally concerned about what the digital age of instant information will do to developing brains. Will it decrease critical thought if information is swallowed whole without critical thought to its validity?
Quite an interesting book with lots of scientific detail. A little heavy going for the casual reader like me because of that.
April 12, 2025
I have it 100 pages and then gave up. In my opinion, this is a very badly written book, honestly. It’s repetitive, painfully repetitive. It’s “scientific� without citation, and verbose and academic in areas it doesn’t need to be. It feels like an academic “dumbed down� their work to make it accessible to the public the wrong way round. They removed citations which are actually needed and made generalised statements about the brain without citations � bad practice, even for the general public � but then overemphasised and dragged out really basic principles about things most readers will know to the point it was deeply patronising and, quite frankly, incredibly dull.
I found the use of Socrates as an argument deeply ironic. Using Socrates� weariness of writing and his advocacy against it (let’s call it as it is, gatekeeping knowledge) and somewhat disagree with it but also use some principles of it to apply it to digital information, and ironically present this argument in a written format which negates the founding principles you’re employing is.. a choice. An ironic one of that.
Socrates was so important in our understanding of knowledge and breaking down the principles of questioning the world, but I’d be reluctant in ever using any of eugenicist Socrates� arguments to back up my own.
And don’t get me wrong. I am also incredibly wary of knowledge in the internet, but I think that, rather than worrying about “oh no, what about the children?!� and pointing a finger at the internet, perhaps parents should be questioning how they’re parenting their children and teaching them how to manage knowledge and information they find online? Just a thought�
I found the use of Socrates as an argument deeply ironic. Using Socrates� weariness of writing and his advocacy against it (let’s call it as it is, gatekeeping knowledge) and somewhat disagree with it but also use some principles of it to apply it to digital information, and ironically present this argument in a written format which negates the founding principles you’re employing is.. a choice. An ironic one of that.
Socrates was so important in our understanding of knowledge and breaking down the principles of questioning the world, but I’d be reluctant in ever using any of eugenicist Socrates� arguments to back up my own.
And don’t get me wrong. I am also incredibly wary of knowledge in the internet, but I think that, rather than worrying about “oh no, what about the children?!� and pointing a finger at the internet, perhaps parents should be questioning how they’re parenting their children and teaching them how to manage knowledge and information they find online? Just a thought�
June 22, 2024
This book discusses the origins of writing, development of alphabets, and the pathways formed in the reading brain. It discusses how children learn to read and the requirements for success. It concludes with what happens in the brain when learning to read does not go smoothly. Specifically, there is a lengthy section about dyslexia. One of the author’s children has dyslexia, and she is known for her research in the field.
Reading is not a naturally occurring or inherited skill, and our brains have adapted. I was particularly interested in the way neural pathways can lead to deeper and more critical thinking. I also enjoyed the discussion of the early Greek societies, particularly Socrates, who worried that reading would reduce a person’s ability to engage in his “dialogues� and skill at memorization. Wolf touches on concerns that the digital age may be changing our brain’s neural pathways yet again, but this topic is not explored in any depth.
There is lots of good information contained in the book and it starts off well. The writing is dense and, I think, overly scientific in places, particularly toward the end. The casual reader may not want to start here if looking for the basics. It will likely appeal to those who want to gain a deeper understanding of the current knowledge of dyslexia. If you are looking for information on Proust, you won’t find much here. My guess is that it was just a catchy name for a book. I thought there would be more of a tie-in, so I was slightly disappointed.
Reading is not a naturally occurring or inherited skill, and our brains have adapted. I was particularly interested in the way neural pathways can lead to deeper and more critical thinking. I also enjoyed the discussion of the early Greek societies, particularly Socrates, who worried that reading would reduce a person’s ability to engage in his “dialogues� and skill at memorization. Wolf touches on concerns that the digital age may be changing our brain’s neural pathways yet again, but this topic is not explored in any depth.
There is lots of good information contained in the book and it starts off well. The writing is dense and, I think, overly scientific in places, particularly toward the end. The casual reader may not want to start here if looking for the basics. It will likely appeal to those who want to gain a deeper understanding of the current knowledge of dyslexia. If you are looking for information on Proust, you won’t find much here. My guess is that it was just a catchy name for a book. I thought there would be more of a tie-in, so I was slightly disappointed.
February 17, 2025
I skimmed this. It is is a mishmash of anecdotes, literary passages, summaries of reading research, and "neuroscience" (see ). There's a lot of stuff that has nothing to do with Proust, squids or the science of reading. And some of the science-explaining is muddy enough to be causing real-world confusion among teachers about how to teach reading.
Alternatives:
Nerd addendum:
The author starts off with highlighting the "3o million word gap" from the Hart and Risley study. However, there are many well-publicized flaws (small sample size, intrusive measurement techniques, failure to replicate, etc.) with that study. Nobody seriously talks about a "30 million word gap" anymore because subsequent research has debunked that. More importantly, if you actually read Hart and Risley , you will find that it doesn't imply what people say it does, because it found no connection between pre-school vocabulary growth and later reading, writing, math, etc. The author's presentation of this research as a basis for actions like reading aloud is thus confusing.
Alternatives:
Nerd addendum:
The author starts off with highlighting the "3o million word gap" from the Hart and Risley study. However, there are many well-publicized flaws (small sample size, intrusive measurement techniques, failure to replicate, etc.) with that study. Nobody seriously talks about a "30 million word gap" anymore because subsequent research has debunked that. More importantly, if you actually read Hart and Risley , you will find that it doesn't imply what people say it does, because it found no connection between pre-school vocabulary growth and later reading, writing, math, etc. The author's presentation of this research as a basis for actions like reading aloud is thus confusing.
March 8, 2009
At times the book probably delved deeper into the science than I as a general read would have preferred, and the emphasis on dyslexia was at times distracting - but no question, a fascinating, valuable book. For two points alone I'd recommended it: One, Wolf's fluent, intelligent consideration of Socrates' opposition to the development of written language, which he feared would have an adverse affect on the imaginative capacity of the educated. Two, the whole notion that read books actually rewires our brains - and changes who we are and how we think.
Here's a good quote from near the end:
"Socrates feared above all else that the 'semblance of truth,' conveyed by the seeming permanence of this written language, would lead to the end of the search for true knowledge, and that this loss would mean the death of human virtue as we know it. Socrates never knew the secret at the heart of reading: the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before. Proust knew this secret, and we do. The mysterious, invisible gift of time to think beyond is the reading brain's greatest achievement."
Here's a good quote from near the end:
"Socrates feared above all else that the 'semblance of truth,' conveyed by the seeming permanence of this written language, would lead to the end of the search for true knowledge, and that this loss would mean the death of human virtue as we know it. Socrates never knew the secret at the heart of reading: the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before. Proust knew this secret, and we do. The mysterious, invisible gift of time to think beyond is the reading brain's greatest achievement."
Read
July 6, 2010What I Learned From This Book: Alphabetic systems of writing are much more evolved and efficient than ideographic systems, and therefore "our" brains are Wired Differently from The Chinese. And that "we" all grew up reading Twain and Austen and Proust. Also, the internetz are destroying literacy and creating a new generation of people who are unable to read or memorise anything, I mean real reading and real memorisation, like we did in the old days. We know this because if we ask children how many poems they know by heart, it isn't many, unlike when we were lads and lasses and English was taught properly from the far superior ink 'n' paper. Of course we didn't ask them how many songs they know the lyrics to. What on earth could you mean? That's not _real_ memory. Or _real_ poetry.
Also, chapter-long technical passages should be written in italics to make them more difficult to read, complete with a patronising introduction about how you can skip this bit if it's too complicated for your tiny mind.
Ugh. Yes, I'm exaggerating - a little. I'm sure there were plenty of good bits in this book, but I was mostly just irritated.
Also, chapter-long technical passages should be written in italics to make them more difficult to read, complete with a patronising introduction about how you can skip this bit if it's too complicated for your tiny mind.
Ugh. Yes, I'm exaggerating - a little. I'm sure there were plenty of good bits in this book, but I was mostly just irritated.
November 7, 2023
Excellent and encyclopedic look at the science, history, neuroscience and more of reading
August 28, 2021
This was a decent book with a few good ideas in it, but it was not what I expected or wanted.
I was intrigued by the ideas that reading is an unnatural activity that we were not evolved to do and that fluent reading requires our plastic brains to engage several very different capabilities that are seated in different parts of the brain. This means that reading problems could arise from issues in any of the separate areas of the brain that are used for reading or in the quality or timing of the connections between them.
I also liked the idea that the distinguishing feature of fluent reading is that we become so good at decoding that we gain time (microseconds, but they are all that we need) to pause and consider as we read, so that the act of reading becomes an interactive experience of reflection and rumination that goes way beyond absorption of information. I knew I liked reading because it makes me think, but I had believed that this came when I consciously paused at the end of a paragraph or chapter; now I understand that it is inherent in the reading process itself.
But what I really wanted that was part of what this book claimed to be about, but failed to deliver, was a clear and detailed explantion of how reading changes our thought processes. We are given comparisons of reading and non-reading people who respond differently to questions and score differently on psychological tests, but there is precious little about what these differences are and what they mean. There are also hints about how the changes might be different for different types of languages, but again this was just a taste that left me hungering for more. I am also curious about how the changes in brain function are different for information delivered through digital media than for books; in this area the book delivers ominous warnings, but little substance. Oh well, there was enough good stuff here to make the book worth reading, so I can't be too disappointed.
I was intrigued by the ideas that reading is an unnatural activity that we were not evolved to do and that fluent reading requires our plastic brains to engage several very different capabilities that are seated in different parts of the brain. This means that reading problems could arise from issues in any of the separate areas of the brain that are used for reading or in the quality or timing of the connections between them.
I also liked the idea that the distinguishing feature of fluent reading is that we become so good at decoding that we gain time (microseconds, but they are all that we need) to pause and consider as we read, so that the act of reading becomes an interactive experience of reflection and rumination that goes way beyond absorption of information. I knew I liked reading because it makes me think, but I had believed that this came when I consciously paused at the end of a paragraph or chapter; now I understand that it is inherent in the reading process itself.
But what I really wanted that was part of what this book claimed to be about, but failed to deliver, was a clear and detailed explantion of how reading changes our thought processes. We are given comparisons of reading and non-reading people who respond differently to questions and score differently on psychological tests, but there is precious little about what these differences are and what they mean. There are also hints about how the changes might be different for different types of languages, but again this was just a taste that left me hungering for more. I am also curious about how the changes in brain function are different for information delivered through digital media than for books; in this area the book delivers ominous warnings, but little substance. Oh well, there was enough good stuff here to make the book worth reading, so I can't be too disappointed.
August 31, 2018
I first read this in 2007 when it was published, and I'm re-reading it this week before I get a copy of Wolf's new book, Reader, Come Home. I also want to refresh my memory with regard to Wolf's thoughts on dyslexia. For a while I've been concerned that my seven-year old niece still cannot read, and I really think she may be dyslexic. Neither her parents nor, apparently, her teachers, are overly concerned that she is behind grade level in reading, because she is quite precocious in all other areas, and they seem to think one day it'll just "click". I'm not an educator, but I think it's vital that she catch up this year (second grade) or have a true assessment of what is going on with her reading before she falls far behind her classmates. I truly think her brain is "wired" differently - she still mixes up letters, writes them reversed, can't always name the initial letters of common words, doesn't have "sight words" (not even "the," I was shocked to realize!) and her eyes just don't focus on the words on the page. We were playing charades last week and she and I were coming up with things for the group to act out, and she wanted to do phrases - she reeled off a whole list of them for me to write down, and she was recalling them all from auditory memory from a story that other kids in her summer group had read (the cow jumped over the moon, a bird in the hand, etc.) - she was remarkable at drawing them out of memory, but she had not read the words - she was only recalling the sounds. She also memorizes entire books - she fooled her parents all last spring when she convinced them she was reading a certain book, but I watched her "read" it and noticed that her eyes were not on the words, and when I wrote down a word from the book on another piece of paper, she didn't know the word. I'm worried. Also on the to-read shelf: books by Mark Seidenberg, Stanislas Dehaene, and Daniel Willingham.
August 31, 2021
Reading Proust and the Squid is like touring a really, really good museum, with Maryanne Wolf guiding us through individual exhibits that at first seem to bear little connection, until she subtly strings them all together as facets of the reading experience. It's a dramatic and even sacred activity, reading, but I think Wolf allows us to access that sense best by keeping to the confident and objective tone of the tour guide and voiceover.
What I think of as the "exhibits" of this text are the highly numerous anecdotes that all inform the emerging sense of reading as a set of simultaneous activities on many scales, behavioral, cognitive, neuronal, genetic, with warnings and promises for the future of reading. And so, so many intriguing questions and related topics to ponder and come back to.
It's oddly difficult for me to wrap my mind around the title of this book, which is a great example of its intriguing features. "Proust" signifies for the author a metaphor for reading as a personal intellectual journey of self-change, while the "squid" signifies an analogy: early neuroscience discovered neuron connection and repair processes with squid "axons;" today's science of reading involves extensions of that research, except now on the much narrower human neurons. So Wolf wants to link and pair off anecdotes on the intellectual journey of reading lives with brain scans and genetics that are letting us look at the mechanism of the intellect. (One thinks of the "long zoom" idea, that evolution and innovation happen on multiple scales simultaneously in nature and in culture; see )
One of the central warnings the book dwells on is the argument that reading may have deleterious effects on our personal or social development. Socrates thought that spoken language was more alive, dynamic, and able to help students access truth and virtue, while the written language was dead, and pretended to stand for the real, when that was only an illusion. The mind is expanded by memorizing much spoken material, but storing the material offsite in the written language makes a brain lazy. And written texts could end up in the hands of readers who don't understand it, which could lead to the text being abused. Dr. Wolf finds implications in these old objects for the future of reading under new regimes of information technologies. Multitasking, spending hours and hours before screens, facing enormous new amounts of information, could all have major effects. Maybe we'll learn to process information even more effectively. Maybe we'll become weak-minded and passive, largely unable to understand the very technologies we created. Put simply, we need to code-switch from digital native mode back to more traditional reading mode (and oral literature mode, such as when we memorize poems, is still valuable as well).
There's also a lot here about dyslexia, which is Dr. Wolf's main area of research. The field has turned back to one of its forerunners, Norman Geschwind, who was early to realize that dyslexics frequently have high talents in many areas, and "this is likely no accident." Taking much more time to learn to read often indicates genetic diversity expressed via language and visual processing, and maybe senses of time, as well. But these minds could well have the most to offer, properly harnessed -- think Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein, and many more.
Like any good exhibit, there's really too much to take in in one trip here. Following up on just the brain imaging studies of reading and reading disability is a good impetus for a whole afternoon of YouTube hole, for example. (This from Guinevere F. Eden is long, but presents fascinating slides from brain imaging devices highlighting evidence of differences in dyslexic brains.) And I love the many examples Wolf brings up from literature -- the ethics lessons of , the different reading responses we have to the great novels, like , when we read them at different ages. (Dr. Wolf, what does it say about me that I sympathized with Casaubon from my very first reading, as a mere 30-year-old?)
For someone who likes to read as much as I do, this book is a crucial window into the emerging science of the subject; previously, I had not quite distinguished reading from spoken language as cognitive activities, and so maybe I misapplied lessons from Steven Pinker's . Pursuing the cognitive science of spoken language and reading together will give us a much stronger sense of the brain as a complex system with both deep programming and astounding levels of variability.
What I think of as the "exhibits" of this text are the highly numerous anecdotes that all inform the emerging sense of reading as a set of simultaneous activities on many scales, behavioral, cognitive, neuronal, genetic, with warnings and promises for the future of reading. And so, so many intriguing questions and related topics to ponder and come back to.
It's oddly difficult for me to wrap my mind around the title of this book, which is a great example of its intriguing features. "Proust" signifies for the author a metaphor for reading as a personal intellectual journey of self-change, while the "squid" signifies an analogy: early neuroscience discovered neuron connection and repair processes with squid "axons;" today's science of reading involves extensions of that research, except now on the much narrower human neurons. So Wolf wants to link and pair off anecdotes on the intellectual journey of reading lives with brain scans and genetics that are letting us look at the mechanism of the intellect. (One thinks of the "long zoom" idea, that evolution and innovation happen on multiple scales simultaneously in nature and in culture; see )
One of the central warnings the book dwells on is the argument that reading may have deleterious effects on our personal or social development. Socrates thought that spoken language was more alive, dynamic, and able to help students access truth and virtue, while the written language was dead, and pretended to stand for the real, when that was only an illusion. The mind is expanded by memorizing much spoken material, but storing the material offsite in the written language makes a brain lazy. And written texts could end up in the hands of readers who don't understand it, which could lead to the text being abused. Dr. Wolf finds implications in these old objects for the future of reading under new regimes of information technologies. Multitasking, spending hours and hours before screens, facing enormous new amounts of information, could all have major effects. Maybe we'll learn to process information even more effectively. Maybe we'll become weak-minded and passive, largely unable to understand the very technologies we created. Put simply, we need to code-switch from digital native mode back to more traditional reading mode (and oral literature mode, such as when we memorize poems, is still valuable as well).
There's also a lot here about dyslexia, which is Dr. Wolf's main area of research. The field has turned back to one of its forerunners, Norman Geschwind, who was early to realize that dyslexics frequently have high talents in many areas, and "this is likely no accident." Taking much more time to learn to read often indicates genetic diversity expressed via language and visual processing, and maybe senses of time, as well. But these minds could well have the most to offer, properly harnessed -- think Thomas Edison, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albert Einstein, and many more.
Like any good exhibit, there's really too much to take in in one trip here. Following up on just the brain imaging studies of reading and reading disability is a good impetus for a whole afternoon of YouTube hole, for example. (This from Guinevere F. Eden is long, but presents fascinating slides from brain imaging devices highlighting evidence of differences in dyslexic brains.) And I love the many examples Wolf brings up from literature -- the ethics lessons of , the different reading responses we have to the great novels, like , when we read them at different ages. (Dr. Wolf, what does it say about me that I sympathized with Casaubon from my very first reading, as a mere 30-year-old?)
For someone who likes to read as much as I do, this book is a crucial window into the emerging science of the subject; previously, I had not quite distinguished reading from spoken language as cognitive activities, and so maybe I misapplied lessons from Steven Pinker's . Pursuing the cognitive science of spoken language and reading together will give us a much stronger sense of the brain as a complex system with both deep programming and astounding levels of variability.
March 18, 2019
The more you learn about what goes on in the brain during reading, the more improbable it starts to seem. Unlike vision or speech, there are no structures that evolved specifically for reading. Instead, other parts of the brain, such as pattern matching and sound recognition, were pressed into service and merged with the brain’s ability to synthesize information from multiple sources. Somehow mankind gained the ability to recognize written symbols and associate the words they referred to with the spoken sounds they represented.
Brain scans reveal multiple areas lighting up as we read, but not all languages activate the same areas. Pictographic languages such as Chinese rely more heavily on visual areas of the brain than do alphabetic languages. Up to half a dozen discrete brain regions are activated and integrated as a person reads, and the same areas engage whether involved in actual reading or just thinking about letters and words.
Many things can disrupt the process of becoming a fluent reader. When the author first raised concerns about reading comprehension in the age of the internet it sounded like overblown hand-wringing, but as she got further into the cultural and physiological processes involved, it became clear that becoming a good reader requires the ability to engage with a text on multiple levels, something not always present in an age of soundbites and video snippets.
There are many parts to being able to read easily. It is not just the ability to sound out letters, but also knowing the various vowel combinations, gaining a sense of semantics so that a new word’s meaning can be inferred from its root, and possessing sufficient vocabulary to understand what is being read. The author cites an astounding statistic that by the time they learn to read children who come from homes where they are frequently spoken and read to may have been exposed to 32 million more words than children who were not so engaged. The result is a large vocabulary gap that only widens over the years. “When one realizes that children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their schools years, and that at least 9,000 of those words need to be learned by the end of grade 3, the huge importance of a child’s development of vocabulary becomes crystal-clear.� (p. 123)
The book also looks at dyxlexia, and it too is far more complicated than most people think. It reminded me of the description of cancer, that it is not one disease but many, with vast differences between some of them, but all have the same result of uncontrolled cell division. Dyslexia seems to have just as many causes, all resulting in difficulty reading. The most interesting forms were ones where brains just seemed to be wired differently, slowing down the reader’s ability to translate symbols into words. For most people that translation takes place in the left hemisphere, but in some dyslexics it is in the right.
Many brilliant and gifted people have had dyslexia, leading to the intriguing idea that it is not a deficiency but a different way of processing information, sometimes granting an enhanced ability to interpret data from many sources and integrate it into something that goes beyond just words on a page.
Finally, there is an observation about something I notice every time I sit down to write an e-mail, a report, or, for that matter, a ŷ review. I recognized it, but could not have expressed it until I read
Yes, that’s it exactly.
I had this book on my reading list for some time before I got to it. I was kind of put off by the title, which sounded too lighthearted, like it was just going to be a collection of clever anecdotes about reading and readers. It is in fact a good introduction to the science of reading, written for the non-specialist, and including a number of drawings to help help explain what is going on as the reader turns squiggles on the screen or page into words, comprehension, and knowledge.
Brain scans reveal multiple areas lighting up as we read, but not all languages activate the same areas. Pictographic languages such as Chinese rely more heavily on visual areas of the brain than do alphabetic languages. Up to half a dozen discrete brain regions are activated and integrated as a person reads, and the same areas engage whether involved in actual reading or just thinking about letters and words.
Many things can disrupt the process of becoming a fluent reader. When the author first raised concerns about reading comprehension in the age of the internet it sounded like overblown hand-wringing, but as she got further into the cultural and physiological processes involved, it became clear that becoming a good reader requires the ability to engage with a text on multiple levels, something not always present in an age of soundbites and video snippets.
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? (p. 221)
There are many parts to being able to read easily. It is not just the ability to sound out letters, but also knowing the various vowel combinations, gaining a sense of semantics so that a new word’s meaning can be inferred from its root, and possessing sufficient vocabulary to understand what is being read. The author cites an astounding statistic that by the time they learn to read children who come from homes where they are frequently spoken and read to may have been exposed to 32 million more words than children who were not so engaged. The result is a large vocabulary gap that only widens over the years. “When one realizes that children have to learn about 88,700 written words during their schools years, and that at least 9,000 of those words need to be learned by the end of grade 3, the huge importance of a child’s development of vocabulary becomes crystal-clear.� (p. 123)
The book also looks at dyxlexia, and it too is far more complicated than most people think. It reminded me of the description of cancer, that it is not one disease but many, with vast differences between some of them, but all have the same result of uncontrolled cell division. Dyslexia seems to have just as many causes, all resulting in difficulty reading. The most interesting forms were ones where brains just seemed to be wired differently, slowing down the reader’s ability to translate symbols into words. For most people that translation takes place in the left hemisphere, but in some dyslexics it is in the right.
As eminent researchers Ovid Tzeng and William Wang observed years ago, the left hemisphere evolved to handle the exquisite precision and timing necessary for human speech and written language; by contrast, the right hemisphere became better suited for operations on a larger scale, such as creativity, pattern deduction, and contextual skills. (p.188)
Many brilliant and gifted people have had dyslexia, leading to the intriguing idea that it is not a deficiency but a different way of processing information, sometimes granting an enhanced ability to interpret data from many sources and integrate it into something that goes beyond just words on a page.
Finally, there is an observation about something I notice every time I sit down to write an e-mail, a report, or, for that matter, a ŷ review. I recognized it, but could not have expressed it until I read
[Lev] Vygotsky observed that the very process of writing one’s thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to discover new ways of thinking. � In other words, the writer’s efforts to capture ideas with ever more precise written words contain within them an inner dialogue, which each of us who has struggled to articulate our thoughts knows from the experience of watching our ideas change shape through the sheer effort of writing.� (p. 73).
Yes, that’s it exactly.
I had this book on my reading list for some time before I got to it. I was kind of put off by the title, which sounded too lighthearted, like it was just going to be a collection of clever anecdotes about reading and readers. It is in fact a good introduction to the science of reading, written for the non-specialist, and including a number of drawings to help help explain what is going on as the reader turns squiggles on the screen or page into words, comprehension, and knowledge.
October 29, 2022
*3.5
Reading this after Wolf's sequel Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World as well as Seidenberg's Language at the speed of sight and Hirsch's Why Knowledge Matters, this book had less new information for me than it would otherwise have had. Reading chapters that cover much of what I already know is always a bit of a challenge for me. Still, there were interesting details about the history of writing systems that Seidenberg didn't cover, and the later review of what is known about the development of reading covered a lot that wasn't in Reader, Come Home, so I'm still glad I read this. The line of argument is not always easy to follow (less so than in her later book) but there's plenty to get from this.
Reading this after Wolf's sequel Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World as well as Seidenberg's Language at the speed of sight and Hirsch's Why Knowledge Matters, this book had less new information for me than it would otherwise have had. Reading chapters that cover much of what I already know is always a bit of a challenge for me. Still, there were interesting details about the history of writing systems that Seidenberg didn't cover, and the later review of what is known about the development of reading covered a lot that wasn't in Reader, Come Home, so I'm still glad I read this. The line of argument is not always easy to follow (less so than in her later book) but there's plenty to get from this.
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