World Famous Comics: Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
By: Maryanne Wolf Publisher: Harper Average Rating: Binding: Hardcover Label: Harper Number of Items: 1 Number of Pages: 320 Publication Date: September 01, 2007 Release Date: September 04, 2007
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.
Scientific yet smooth While I disagreed with some of Wolf's arguments regarding how early literacy practices affect reading later in life, I found her book extremely useful in understanding the brain processes involved in learning to read. She manages to write fairly scientifically without using too much jargon and losing the reader. The pages--which are chock full of useful tips for parents and educators alike--flew by.
Good Popularization of Serious Research It is perhaps more enjoyable to listen to this on the CDs, as I did while waiting for the paperback to come out. So many people were citing it that I felt I needed to know what was in it and didn't want to buy the older hardback version in case there were any significant updates. I purchased the paperback as well, because I needed to be able to cite accurately the parts that I wanted to share with students. It provides some useful historical background about how written languages were developed for those of us who teach language acquisition and/or language arts and reading courses, but who wouldn't choose a text that spent much time on that topic. The author shares a point of view regarding the possible evolutionary advantages of differences we notice most poignantly and painfully in the consequences of the varied ways the brains of those who have reading disabilities try to cope with the heavy reading demands of our culture (the Squid with disabilities) paired with the exceptional opportunities to experience and interpret the world that reading offers (Proust). While much of this point of view is well supported by the research she cites, it is also informed by a mother's concern that a child who has reading disabilities not be regarded as less able to contribute in valuable ways to his/her own achievement and in unique and creative ways to meet the ever more varied needs of society.
Part Science, Part Guilt Trip I have nothing against a good sermon. I found Barack Obama's sermon to the Democratic convention to be at least as exciting as any of Kennedy's or King's great exhortations. I do think, however, that sermons need to be preached outside the choir. The irony of writing a book to exhort non-reading parents to read more to their children is not lost on anyone, I hope.
The human brain has evolved in such a way that it can, and must, learn. That is, it is 'plastic' enough in its first years of life to program itself in response to environmental cues. In the case of learning to read, Maryanne Wolf, argues, the brains of all of us literate people have been exquisitely programmed and refined by our reading skills, developed in cahoots with our own evolution over millennia. The physical details of that programming are becoming observable through brain scans and such technology, and it's the science of brain plasticity that interested me in reading this book. I'm already quite convinced, by experience and observation, that the only way to become a skilled reader is by reading a lot, i.e. that reading is a self-programming activity long into the adolescent years. The scanting of reading - even recreational self-selected reading of ephemeral stuff like sci-fi - in schools and in the life experience of our youth these days worries me a lot. I rather hoped this book would get scientific enough to allow me to consider my opinion verified.
Alas, much more than half of Wolf's overall text is more sermon than science, and in my case she is clearly preaching to the choir. The parents whose children might profit if said parents read thsi and other books more eagerly just won't read Proust and the Squid. Period. What Wolf really has in mind is influencing public policy, persuading legislators to spend taxpayers' money on early childhood education. Her exhortation is wasted therefore, unless it has the sort of substance that will focus the voters on change and intimidate the legislators into action. It doesn't have that kind of intensity, and then it squanders the impact its early chapters may have built up by straying into vague thoughts about a fuzzy future in which "digital" info-interfacing replaces reading and jeopardizes the sophisticated programming that reading has implanted in our culture.
It's not because this is a bad book, or a badly written book, that I don't recommend it highly. Some people, I'm sure, will be delighted by its loose style and others will be educated about important insights of neuropsychology in recent years. But it's not the book it could be if its purpose were clearer and if it addressed itself to a proper audience rather than to the world at large.
Post script: Reading the comments that have followed this review, I discover that I've given some people the false impression that the "science of reading" is scanted in Proust and the Squid. There's plenty of science, and it's expressed in a form accessible to non-scientists. But it's interspersed with anecdote and homily to the point where I find it hard to assemble into a scientific understanding. Still, my three-star rating was probably too harsh; four stars would be more suitable.
To Change Your Life - One Only Needs To Read Maybe "only" is a little over the top, but the story and science of the reading brain has a strong argument that by reading, your brain does change and sometimes with profound consequences and insight. Much like another fine book on an unrelated subject that I read "Geography of Thought", the methods of how you read influences how your brain processes the information. For example, "A brain wired to read Egyptian hieroglyphs or Chinese characters activates some areas which are rarely used to read the Greek or English alphabet, and vice versa." So the way we read either by alphabet, right-to-left, left-to-right, or rebus symbols effects how our synaptic connections are built over time. If true, we then do have differences in thought from different societies which differ in their geographic location.
As the evolutionary aspects of the brain have only recently learned to read, less than 50 generations, we are still learning why some with such difficulties with reading can still be very successful in our current societies. As the author fully details, many with the added reading challenge of dyslexia are, or have, become very successful even with this challenge from the suspected Leonardo da Vinci to the creative Andy Warhol and countless others. Why? Neuroscience indicates that persons with dyslexia are more hemispheric dominate in which strengthens the other attributes that they may have.
All in, this was a little off subject from my normal genre, but I am glad I took the time to expand and build my synaptic connections and hopefully will be able to recognize dyslexia in children going forward :)
Proust? a Squid? huh? Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at Tufts and director of a reading laboratory there, wants very much for you to understand three things: reading is a skill that must be learned and practiced generation after generation (we have no genetic direction to read); that reading can happen only when various genetically programmed parts of the brain develop the interconnected pathways to trigger and share information, which doesn't always happen in everyone; that the "reading" people do on the internet is not reinforcing the reading that one does of books, but rather is developing new connections in the brain, and so while it may be useful, reading on the internet exclusively will change a person's ability to read extended pieces of prose, poetry, etc. and also change the way he or she thinks. Ms. Wolf wants you to know this so much that she repeats herself many times in the course of this book. She also wants to make a splash as a popularizer of science, a la Steven Pinker. However, Ms. Wolf, who has spent much time studying reading, has not so fully as Dr. Pinker grasped the mechanics of writing. Her prose is forced--the title of the book includes a squid who gets only one sentence of notice in the first chapter. She also forces her transitions, making it hard for the reader to smoothly follow her train of though. She includes random, inconsequential factoids (it makes not a whit of difference to her argument that Socrates' teacher was a woman named Diotima). The first chapter, with some editing, would make a good and sufficient article in _The Atlantic_. The rest is hard to read and contains little information, except that all children must be read to frequently in order to make them ready to read in kindergarden--information that should be shouted from every street corner! The chapters on how the brain reads are informative, if excessively wordy, which is why I rate this book a 3.
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