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

I have taught written language skills (reading, writing and spelling) to reluctant learners (mainly individuals with dyslexia) for thirty years. This book, PROUST AND THE SQUID: THE STORY AND SCIENCE OF THE READING BRAIN, is a book that I would highly recommend to my colleagues and others interested in language and its development. The author, Maryanne Wolf, delights readers with a historical perspective of reading, confirms the reason for reading and provided thought provoking insights into the future of reading.

In this fascinating work, which might be viewed as an introduction to the cognitive neuroscience of reading, the author gives the reader an excellent overview of the cultural origins of writing/reading, the brain mechanisms that are responsible for the ability to read, and the factors behind the inability to read. Written for a general audience, the book does contain some information of a more technical nature for those readers who might have a general background in neuroscience or cognitive neuroscience. Those readers who need more can find much more detailed information in the references. Everything about this book is interesting, especially to those who may be described as "obsessive" readers that spend a great majority of their life reading and are interested in knowing more about the cognitive mechanisms behind the reading act. There are many interesting discussions and questions that are provoked by the reading of this book. Some of these include: - Once one has achieved what the author has called "expert" reading status, what is the effect of biological age on this status? Does biological aging affect the "rate of processing" of textual information and if so to what degree? Along these same lines, is it more difficult for an older person to learn how to read as compared to young children? - Erotic literature has the propensity for physical arousal, so does its reading evoke even more of the imaginative properties of the reading brain than does other types of literature or less? In addition, it would seem that the limbic system would play a greater role in erotic literature, since more emphasis is being placed on attention and imagination than comprehension. - The technical description that author gives of the "first 500 milliseconds" of reading is fascinating and sheds light on the degree to which the reader must be attentive to the words in the text. But in relation to the need for this attention, while reading a book everyone no doubt has experienced the process of "drifting": you are turning the pages of the book and reading the text but your mind is engaged in other thoughts far removed from the content of the book. After some time and possibly many pages later you catch yourself and then skim the pages you thought you missed. Is the information in the book still assimilated when "drifting" or is completely ignored because the reader is not exercising deliberate concentration? Or is it being partially assimilated and to what degree? And if only partially, can the "skimming" fill in the lost details? If one believes the author's technical description then when "drifting" certain areas of the `parietal lobe', those that are responsible for "disengaging" attention from whatever else we are doing, are not being activated, but the `superior colliculi' that is responsible for eye movements, and the `thalamus' that coordinates information from the brain are. - Is "speed reading" a viable or effective strategy and what exactly is behi

I was attracted to this book by the title: What could Proust and a Squid have in common? As it turned out, squids make only two cameo appearances in the book on pages 5-6 and 226 (probably to justify the title in references to the early use of squids in neuroscience studies and for conjecture about passing along genetic traits that make survival more difficult), but Proust in pretty mainstream throughout the book as a resource and reference for describing the richness that reading can bring to individual experience. Professor Wolf has written a multidisciplinary book that is mind-boggling in its breadth. You'll learn everything from how writing and alphabets developed to why Socrates disfavored reading to how mental processes vary among dyslexics who are reading different languages to the best ways for diagnosing and overcoming reading difficulties. Yet unlike most multidisciplinary books, this one is very brief and compact. But that compactness is misleading; Proust and the Squid is a challenging book to read and contemplate. Only good readers with a lot of background in literature and neuroscience can probably grasp this book. What's more, there are vast numbers of references that you can pursue if you want to know more. The writing style makes the book denser than it needed to be. Professor Wolf makes matters worse for lay readers by insisting on the correct scientific names throughout, when the ordinary names would have made the material easier to grasp. As a result, at times you'll feel like you are taking a course in disciplinary vocabulary. At other times, Professor Wolf engages in a penchant for long, abstract sentences: "What is historically humbling about Sumerian writing and pedagogy is not their understanding of morphological principles, but their realization that the teaching of reading must begin with explicit attention to the principles characteristics of oral language." This sentence could be rewritten as "Most impressively, Sumerians developed a written language that made reading easier to learn by visually reproducing what was spoken." Obviously, her rendition is more creative . . . but I like mine better. Here is what was new to me: Reading involves complex mental processes that are not natural to the brain's earliest functions. As a result, new neural connections need to be developed in the right order if someone is to be a good reader. Various brain scan tests have illuminated this finding and those neural pathways are well illustrated and described in this book. But there are different ways that those neural connections can be made, some of which will make reading difficult. The book's strength is in providing you with a sense of how humans learned how to develop written language and read it rapidly . . . and gain greatly from reading. The book also is good in the area of making the case for those who can't read aren't deficient, rather than are different in ways that offer other potential advantage

Maryanne Wolf has written a deeply rewarding exploration of reading and its impact on the human brain -- from a historical perspective, from a social perspective, from a literary perspective, from a scientific perspective, and finally from the perspective of the parent of a dyslexic son. While neatly transitioning from one topic to the next in a logical sequence, she has also managed to interweave all of these disparate elements throughout the book. With Dr. Wolf's own obvious love affair with the written word and the power of prose, the different perspectives and strands of thought become a metaphor for the brain itself, with its interconnecting, interactive network of billions of neurons. This is a meticulously researched book brimming with detailed scientific information, and yet equally full of rich literary detail, as the history of the reading brain is also the history of the linguistic richness that a few thousand years of literacy has produced. The final chapters deal with dyslexia, and in those chapters I sense a tension between Dr. Wolf's own past and future - just as she sees a tension between the human experience of reading words on paper and the emergence of a digital age. Dr. Wolf has spent a good part of her scientific career attempting to study and categorize dyslexia, breaking it down into a second and third "subtypes" determined by simple tests of a single mental challenge, that of speedy retrieval of words. But the eyes of a parent tell a truth that was hidden to the scientist: as she sits at the dining room table writing "about why Orton was probably wrong" when he wrote of right hemispheric dominance among dyslexic children, her teenage son sits beside her, drawing an exquisitely detailed rendition of the leaning tower of Pisa.... upside down. The dyslexia is not a product of a deficiency in a single skill, but the expression of brain far more exquisitely complex than the drawing it is capable of producing. The next chapter, called "Genes, Gifts, and Dyslexia", shifts from the technical focus on missed connections to an exploration as to "why Orton was right" -- how the creative and artistic talents shared by so many dyslexics may indeed stem from a brain geared to rely more on its right hemispheric connections. The book ends on a note of expectancy, as it is clear that however much we know and the author has laid out for us, we are only beginning the journey to know, understand, and appreciate the wondrous powers of the reading brain. * Reviewer Abigail Marshall is the author of The Everything Parent's Guide To Children With Dyslexia: All You Need To Ensure Your Child's Success (Everything: Parenting and Family)

What is it about humans that makes them so different from the other inhabitants of this planet? It is not our big brains: many species do just fine with a much simpler model. It is not our instincts and intuitions: many species have us beaten there as well. And it is certainly not our empathy or compassion: we can see that those are highly developed in dozens of other species. The real difference seems to be the way in which we can communicate information that endures. Communications that survive us and can be passed to people that we have never met. Complex languages that were able to meld the experiences of many senses were the first step. We can tell stories that contain much more than information: they contain and evoke emotions, memories and even tastes and smells. The second step is far more recent, and it the strange alchemy that in the last few thousand years enabled our ancestors to record, interpret and teach the significance of squiggles and scratchings. This engaging book focuses on a question that many of us have asked at some time or other. How did we come upon the unlikely skill call reading? How did our brains achieve this extraordinary feat, working only with neurological systems that had never tried to make sense of systematized rule-based visually presented material? And what happens in our brain when our eyes scan a line of type? Why do some of us, or some of our children, find it difficult to process the visual information locked in words? Maryanne Wolf is a professor at Tufts University, where she directs the Center for Reading and Language Research and in this book she offers explanations for these and many other questions. The main thrust of her research is cognitive and biological so the book focuses on writing and the evolution of the brain. However, she does not ignore the cultural and historical contexts in which writing developed. She focuses on three fundamental principles that operate throughout the human brain: 1. The capacity to make new connections among older structures 2. The capacity to form or appropriate regions of the brain that are specialized for recognizing and extracting patterns in a mass of information 3. The ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these regions of the brain As a rider to the last point, the recruiting and connecting of different areas of the brain occurs automatically. If you think about someone you will usually be able to associate a visual image of him or her with a sound, smell and emotion. This associative process usually happens without conscious effort. Maryanne's work indicates that these three principles of design provide the neural machinery essential to reading, and she spends some time explaining the evolution of what she calls the "reading brain." This is not a dry academic exercise: understanding the evolution of reading promises to help us make sense of problems like dyslexia, and it is her insights into that common problem that occupy the sec