Customer Reviews

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

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3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

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 second half of the book.

She reveals that that one of her sons suffers from this disability, and discusses something not widely known. There are a number of subtypes of dyslexia, and, as is common with neurological deficits, the brain often compensates. Giving people special talent in fields that emphasize pattern recognition and spatial creativity. I knew someone with disabling dyslexia who set about building a house. Without any kind of diagrams or written plan he was able to calculate the precise amount, shape and size of the timber that would be needed. When he finished the job several months later he was left with only one two foot plank. The remainder of his calculations were spot on. And it does seem that it is the brain that bestows this kind of gift, rather than the person over-compensating for a disability.

Maryanne speaks approvingly of the extraordinary insights of one of my mentors, the late Norman Geschwind. He and a colleague did some fascinating work on a region of the brain called the planum temporale, sadly misspelled in the index. So it surprised me that she did not mention any of the work on disturbances of language with relative preservation of reading in schizophrenia, It would have been interesting to have her take on that.

So why "Proust and the Squid?" Maryanne uses the French novelist Marcel Proust as a metaphor. He believed that reading gives us access to countless different realities that would otherwise be sealed from us. The squid is to pay tribute to the creature who has given so much to neurological research.

I found the book an easy read, but I am a neuroscientist with a particular interest in thought and language, and I always try to imagine what a book might hold for a non-specialist. In places it may be a little difficult for the general reader. Before submitting this review I asked some friends to look over a few sections, and some left them slightly baffled.

I think that scientists have a responsibility to explain their work to the public that pays most of the bills. But I know from personal experience that popularization does not always come easily to people trained to write and communicate in a cautious, unemotional and reserved tone. It is different in the classroom, where the good teacher is expected to lighten up a bit, and pepper his or her teaching with humor and anecdotes. But once we start typing, our old habits return!

I mention this because Maryanne shares the concern of many, that the advent of the computer culture may lead to the atrophy of the "reading brain," which could become no more than an occasionally used device for communicating factual data stripped of all emotion. We already know that many young people fail to comprehend that the abbreviations of the text message cannot be used in school reports. "Texting" is easier and does not required sustained attention. Since humans were never genetically designed to read, such simple solutions may wreck the "reading brain." If young children are not read to, they nearly always fail to learn to read well themselves. Is it already too late for the youngest generation?

This is a fine book by a world expert. It does require a little effort, but it is well worthwhile. I particular recommend it to people who have children with dyslexia. I would also recommend it to people who have dyslexia themselves, but I do not think that an audio version is available yet.



Richard G. Petty, MD, author of Healing, Meaning and Purpose: The Magical Power of the Emerging Laws of Life

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 advantages such as creativity. If someone in your family doesn't read well, you'll love that part of the message.

Where I thought the book was weakest was in worrying about the implications of highly condensed (and possibly inaccurate) online information substituting for traditional reading of books and articles. To me, it seemed like much ado about nothing. Human curiosity will always drive forward learning, something that Professor Wolf doesn't address. Provide that curiosity with more tools and resources, and more learning will take place. Here's an example. Today I was finishing my proofreading of my latest book. In the past, I had researchers diligently check each quotation for accuracy and source. Inevitably, there would be mistakes that weren't caught and made it into my books. By using the internet to crosscheck the sources this time, I was able to do the task much better and in less time . . . correcting many mistakes in the reference sources in my library. Having had this experience, I'll probably do more seeking of quotations directly from the internet in the future . . . and that will probably improve the quality of my quotations.

Bravo, Professor Wolf!

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.

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)

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 behind it? Does speed reading require other neuronal mechanisms over and above what is discussed in the "first 500 milliseconds"? People who claim to be able to speed read usually also claim that they do so with complete comprehension. Is this true or are they missing some important information from the book? Unfortunately the author does not discuss speed reading in this book.

- Does it become easier to assimilate knowledge the more one reads? If one accepts the author's explanations this would be the case, for she holds that less time is required for a "fluent" brain to represent and retrieve the visual, phonological, and semantic information needed for reading. But in this regard is it possible to read "too much", i.e. to read at such an intensity/frequency that a kind of "asymptotic limit" is reached for the ability to retrieve information from `associative' memory as described by the author?

- Is the reading process as discussed by the author different to some degree when reading technical literature? Those who read mathematical texts can attest to the large degree of concentration needed as compared for example to reading a novel or a news story. The author asserts that the speed that we read a word is influenced greatly by the quality and quantity of the semantic or background knowledge that is activated by that word. But does this also hold for mathematical equations or other types of symbolic expressions that are essentially outside colloquial grammars? English grammar for example does not include mathematical expressions as part of its syntax or semantics so when such expressions are included in texts, as they are of course in mathematical texts written in English, the reader's "flow" must be interrupted so as to deal with these expressions. This slows down the reading rate considerably, and frequently a lot of backtracking must be done in order to fully comprehend the text. Ironically, visualization plays a strong role in the understanding of mathematical texts, but the authors of these texts frequently eschew the idea of incorporating diagrams or pictures in them.

- The author devotes a considerable part of the book to the historical invention of language and reading and compares the skepticism of Socrates towards writing/reading to her own skepticism on the use of online tools for the presentation of information. As far as the explanatory power of verbal narratives are concerned, Socrates certainly had a point if one is only concerned with dialogs of a philosophical or argumentative nature, as of course Socrates was deeply embedded in. But think of how difficult it would be exchange highly sophisticated mathematical information in a verbal dialog. Such an exchange almost necessitates the use of writing, as well as its preservation. And as far as online information and the way it is presented, the jury is still out on its efficacy due to the short timeline that the Internet has been available to everyone. In this regard the author, and all of those who love to read, must be careful not to morph into technoreactionaries when dealing with the new methods of presenting information. These new methods may be even more effective, even more fun, than the activity we have all done for thousands of years, this activity which at some point in the future may be christened as "classical reading."

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.

From the title of the book, I expected more information about the development of reading and writing, and of the changes, which took place in our mind - which clearly did not evolve to read.

I am not saying, that the book does not contain this, but far too much space (2/3 0f the volume) is devoted to dislexia, and what to do about it (As the auther has a child with dislexia, this is understandable, but it should say so in the title...)

All in all, it contained to much child - development - hints and not enough of the science I expected.

In her "The Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain," the Tufts University professor Maryanne Wolf explains with detail and rigor how neuroplasticity permitted the brain to read.

"Neuroplasticity" refers to the ability of the brain to grow, repair itself, and to reconstitute its structure. In altering its structure the brain also alters its DNA, permitting these changes to be passed onto future generations.

That is how reading came about. At a social level humans first realized the utility of using abstract symbols to represent objects. Then they realized that these symbols could be in effect systemized and taught to future generations. And some groups realized that these symbols could represent sounds (such as in English), thereby speeding the learning of the language.

And what that meant at the individual brain level was the brain used its existing capabilities - for example, the ability to recognize objects - and created new neural pathways specific to the task of reading. English readers link sound to words, and Chinese readers do not. Thus scans of an English reading brain turn out to possess a different structure than a Chinese reading brain. The Japanese language has elements of both Chinese and English, and a Japanese reading brain ought to combine the structures of the Chinese and English reading brains - and that's exactly what brain scans show.

Of course, a brain that has learned to read over generations can also learn to lose that ability - especially in the digital Internet age where visuals and hyperlinks are replacing paragraph and grammar. That's what frightens Professor Wolf, who refers to the example of Socrates who lamented the proliferation of reading and writing. Greek learning and sophistication meant memorizing Homer and the poets, and after years of such commitment and dedication Greek citizens became profoundly powerful orators. Socrates believed that reading would destroy such a tradition of learning and refinement.

It's strange that Professor Wolf keeps on harking back to Socrates' warnings, because we know he was wrong. As Professor Wolf points out, reading required a new brain structure, and a new brain structure meant new thoughts, which unleashed an outpouring of creativity. And so it stands to reason that the digital age and the Internet would require a new brain structure to absorb the Internet's distinctive way of distributing information - a new structure that would necessitate the blurring and blending of our visual and verbal neural pathways, which will spark new thoughts and ideas.

And reading did not destroy humanity's oral tradition, as Socrates feared. Today in Jerusalem synagogues, Iranian mosques, and the Vatican you have rabbis, imams, and priests who have committed decades of their lives to memorizing and reciting religious texts. And perhaps one hundred years from now we may have a vast majority of humanity thinking visually, but the reading and oral traditions will still live in a dedicated minority.

From the title Professor Wolf lets us know this is not meant to be solely about neuroscience. For her Proust represents the story and the beauty of reading, and the squid represents the science and the mechanics of reading. Her constant shifting from lauding the merits of reading to revealing the neuroscience of reading is annoying and distracting, and offers little to the reader. Her explanation of the different brain structures involved in reading fails to inform, and seems often at times an arbitrary reminder of her academic authority.

Professor Wolf also likes to drown her text with quotations from authors to demonstrate how reading can in effect connect cultures, societies, and time. And that may be cute but it's also annoying and distracting.

Nevertheless overall this book is a good, useful read - although it's a book you should read after reading "The Accidental Mind" and "The Brain that Changes Itself."

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.

This is not an easy read---somewhat ponderous at times---but it IS a fascinating one. The book makes many connections between different areas of research and our understandings about the human brain and written language. As a former first grade teacher, I was captivated.