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

by Maryanne Wolf Narrated by Kirsten Potter

Overview

Reading is a miracle, because the brain was never wired for written language. This eloquent, accessible look at reading explores how it has transformed our brains, our lives, and the world.



It took 2,000 years for written language to develop, and it takes 2,000 days for a child's brain to learn to read. During that time, the brain must literally rearrange itself in order to understand written symbols. What happens when a child has difficulty mastering these abilities?



Using down-to-earth examples and personal anecdotes, a preeminent researcher and literacy lover embarks on a lively journey through the reading brain. Drawing on her vast knowledge of neurology, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and child development, she shows how the brain that read Sumerian cuneiforms on clay tablets is different from the brain that reads images on a computer screen. Just as writing reduced our need for memory, technology is reducing the need for written language-a change sure to have profound consequences for our future.



Fascinating and revelatory for anyone interested in the science of the brain, for parents of young children learning to read, and for those who want to know more about dyslexia.

Editorial Reviews

As booksellers, we don't need to be convinced of the importance of reading, but Maryanne Wolf's sage book goes far beyond what even we imagined. Wolf, a Tufts University professor of child development, is not content to discuss the cultural significance of reading; she asserts with convincing evidence that this activity has radically changed the very organization of the human brain. Using a multidisciplinary approach, she shows how research in neurology, psychology, sociology, and her own specialty has revealed the far-reaching cognitive and perceptual effects of perusing the written word.

Kirkus Reviews

Wolf (Child Development/Tufts Univ.) rehearses the history of reading, reviews the latest research in what our brains are doing while we read and summarizes what's known about the complexities of reading, including causes of and remedies for dyslexia. Regrettably, she conveys this useful information in off-putting prose assembled from an ill-assorted variety of components. The most oppressive, costive academic jargon rubs elbows with expressions of gee-whiz, ain't-this-amazin' enthusiasm. Exclamation points pop up like dandelions on virtually every page, and the author affixes gushy adjectives to the names of many of the authorities she cites, such as "the brilliant neurologist Samuel T. Orton." (All Wolf's sources are "brilliant" or "great" or "gifted.") Also, it's embarrassing when the author of a work with "Proust" in the title refers to the narrator's childhood memories being triggered by the smell of a madeleine in the famous scene from Swann's Way; it was the taste. Despite such stylistic excesses and factual lapses, the author does a creditable job of explaining reading's complexities. Reading is such a relatively recent human activity that the brain has not evolved to accommodate it, she reminds us; as a result, all children must learn "from scratch" this incredibly complex perceptual and intellectual process. Wolf also effectively summarizes the most relevant brain research. She sensitively discusses dyslexia, including some cases in her own family, and convincingly argues that it is often a number of problems that create the disability. She worries about the increasing number of language-impoverished children arriving in the public schools; she wonders about the effects on ourculture and our democracy of generations who have spent far more time viewing Internet images than reading pages of text. Wading through a sticky swamp of jargon, readers will here and there find a flower of insight.

From the Publisher

For everyone who has wondered how reading and writing happen, here is an entertaining, comprehensive, delightfully clear account of how our brain allowed us to become word magicians. A splendid achievement!” — Alberto Manguel, author of A History of Reading

“Wolf’s intriguing combination of linguistic history, sociology, psychology, and neuroscience is engaging and clear. The figures and illustrations as well as the wonderful literary quotes enrich her readable prose...Recommended.” — Library Journal

“[Maryanne Wolf] displays extraordinary passion and perceptiveness concerning the reading brain, its miraculous achievements and tragic dysfunctions.” — BookForum

“Everything Wolf says makes sense....She clearly knows her stuff.” — Washington Post Book World

“Wolf restores our awe of the human brain its adaptability, its creativity and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles.” — San Francisco Chronicle

“Brilliant and eye-opening.” — Philadelphia Inquirer

“[Proust and the Squid] rises from a merely professional tome to a personal and highly accessible project.” — California Literary Review

“Wolf’s knowledge of and appreciation for her subject are apparent....fascinating....Wolf restores our awe of the human brain its adaptability, its creativity and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles.” — Lisa Ko, author of The Leavers

“[Wolf’s] conversational style, reflective comments and insights from work with children...create a narrative flow and bright tone.” — Minneapolis Star Tribune

“The squid of Wolf’s title represents the neurobiological approach to the study of reading....Given the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed, her cold-blooded perspective is opportune.” — The New Yorker

“A book worth talking about.” — U.S. News & World Report

“Enjoyable....Wolf, with remarkable agility in a relatively compact book (intended for both aficionados and the uninitiated), transitions seamlessly between disciplines as diverse as linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and archeology, among others. Her voice comes through clearly; she is fascinated by reading and shares that energy.” — New England Journal of Medicine

“Wolf’s alarm about the spread of semi- literacy among the young is obviously justified, and her book provokes thought about it as only reading can.” — Sunday Times (London)

“This humane and fascinating book...is a paean to what Proust, über-reader, called ‘that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude,’ to all that has been and can be achieved for individuals and for mankind through literacy.” — The Evening Standard (London)

“Blindingly fascinating...detailed and scholarly....There’s a lot of difficult material in here. But it’s worth the effort....For people interested in language, this is a must. You’ll find yourself focusing on words in new ways. Read it slowly—it will take time to sink in.” — The Sunday Telegraph

“Proust and the Squid is an inspiring celebration of the science of reading....Wolf’s insights are fascinating....Proust and the Squid has much to offer on this important—perhaps the most important—subject” — The Guardian (London)

“Her book is a remarkable excavation of something we take largely for granted, and throws up plenty of thought-provoking ideas along the way.” — Sunday Times (London)

Lisa Ko

Wolf’s knowledge of and appreciation for her subject are apparent....fascinating....Wolf restores our awe of the human brain its adaptability, its creativity and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles.

Albany Times Union

Brilliant and eye-opening.

California Literary Review

[Proust and the Squid] rises from a merely professional tome to a personal and highly accessible project.

Alberto Manguel

For everyone who has wondered how reading and writing happen, here is an entertaining, comprehensive, delightfully clear account of how our brain allowed us to become word magicians. A splendid achievement!

BookForum

[Maryanne Wolf] displays extraordinary passion and perceptiveness concerning the reading brain, its miraculous achievements and tragic dysfunctions.

Washington Post Book World

Everything Wolf says makes sense....She clearly knows her stuff.

San Francisco Chronicle

Wolf restores our awe of the human brain its adaptability, its creativity and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles.

Minneapolis Star Tribune

[Wolf’s] conversational style, reflective comments and insights from work with children...create a narrative flow and bright tone.

Philadelphia Inquirer

Brilliant and eye-opening.

San Francisco Chronicle

Wolf restores our awe of the human brain its adaptability, its creativity and its ability to connect with other minds through a procession of silly squiggles.

The Guardian (London)

Proust and the Squid is an inspiring celebration of the science of reading....Wolf’s insights are fascinating....Proust and the Squid has much to offer on this important—perhaps the most important—subject

The New Yorker

The squid of Wolf’s title represents the neurobiological approach to the study of reading....Given the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed, her cold-blooded perspective is opportune.

U.S. News & World Report

A book worth talking about.

The Sunday Telegraph

Blindingly fascinating...detailed and scholarly....There’s a lot of difficult material in here. But it’s worth the effort....For people interested in language, this is a must. You’ll find yourself focusing on words in new ways. Read it slowly—it will take time to sink in.

New England Journal of Medicine

Enjoyable....Wolf, with remarkable agility in a relatively compact book (intended for both aficionados and the uninitiated), transitions seamlessly between disciplines as diverse as linguistics, neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and archeology, among others. Her voice comes through clearly; she is fascinated by reading and shares that energy.

The Evening Standard (London)

This humane and fascinating book...is a paean to what Proust, über-reader, called ‘that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude,’ to all that has been and can be achieved for individuals and for mankind through literacy.

Sunday Times (London)

Wolf’s alarm about the spread of semi- literacy among the young is obviously justified, and her book provokes thought about it as only reading can.

U.S. News & World Report

A book worth talking about.

New Scientist

...intriguing...

The New Yorker

The squid of Wolf’s title represents the neurobiological approach to the study of reading....Given the panic that takes hold of humanists when the decline of reading is discussed, her cold-blooded perspective is opportune.

New Scientist

...intriguing...

Associated Press Staff

Fascinating....Wolf restores our awe of the human brain.

DWD's Reviews

Brilliant. One of the best books I’ve encountered this year.”
—DWD’s Reviews

The Guardian(London)

"Proust and the Squid is an inspiring celebration of the science of reading....Wolf’s insights are fascinating....Proust and the Squid has much to offer on this important—perhaps the most important—subject"

Associated Press

Fascinating....Wolf restores our awe of the human brain.

OCTOBER 2008 - AudioFile

Proust, a metaphor for reading, and the squid, an analogy for early investigations of the nervous system, are meant to tease the curious into exploring a scientific treatise on the subject of literacy. The author integrates multiple disciplines to explain the evolution of the reading brain—its development and some common variations. Narrator Kirsten Potter facilitates the scientific vocabulary, words such as “retinotopic,” “logosyllabary,” “disambiguate,” and “metacognitive.” Speaking as the author, she explains all the difficult terms as they appear, transforming the formidable into the accessible. Potter's scientific fluency makes this challenging information easier to grasp and more enticing than it would be in print. Listeners may be surprised to learn how intellectual and biological transformations take place in their brains as they listen. J.A.H. © AudioFile 2008, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940170099795
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	08/01/2008
Edition description:	Unabridged

Read an Excerpt

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

Chapter One

Reading Lessons From Proust and the Squid

I believe that reading, in its original essence, [is] that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude.
—Marcel Proust

Learning involves the nurturing of nature.
—Joseph LeDoux

We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species. Reading is one of the single most remarkable inventions in history; the ability to record history is one of its consequences. Our ancestors' invention could come about only because of the human brain's extraordinary ability to make new connections among its existing structures, a process made possible by the brain's ability to be shaped by experience. This plasticity at the heart of the brain's design forms the basis for much of who we are, and who we might become.

This book tells the story of the reading brain, in the context of our unfolding intellectual evolution. That story is changing before our eyes and under the tips of our fingers. The next few decades will witness transformations in our ability to communicate, as we recruit new connections in the brain that will propel our intellectual development in new and different ways. Knowing what reading demands of our brain and knowing how it contributes to our capacity to think, to feel, to infer, and to understand other humanbeings is especially important today as we make the transition from a reading brain to an increasingly digital one. By coming to understand how reading evolved historically, how it is acquired by a child, and how it restructured its biological underpinnings in the brain, we can shed new light on our wondrous complexity as a literate species. This places in sharp relief what may happen next in the evolution of human intelligence, and the choices we might face in shaping that future.

This book consists of three areas of knowledge: the early history of how our species learned to read, from the time of the Sumerians to Socrates; the developmental life cycle of humans as they learn to read in ever more sophisticated ways over time; and the story and science of what happens when the brain can't learn to read. Taken together, this cumulative knowledge about reading both celebrates the vastness of our accomplishment as the species that reads, records, and goes beyond what went before, and directs our attention to what is important to preserve.

There is something less obvious that this historical and evolutionary view of the reading brain gives us. It provides a very old and very new approach to how we teach the most essential aspects of the reading process—both for those whose brains are poised to acquire it and for those whose brains have systems that may be organized differently, as in the reading disability known as dyslexia. Understanding these unique hardwired systems—which are preprogrammed generation after generation by instructions from our genes—advances our knowledge in unexpected ways that have implications we are only beginning to explore.

Interwoven through the book's three parts is a particular view of how the brain learns anything new. There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain's astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain's ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. We now know that groups of neurons create new connections and pathways among themselves every time we acquire a new skill. Computer scientists use the term "open architecture" to describe a system that is versatile enough to change—or rearrange—to accommodate the varying demands on it. Within the constraints of our genetic legacy, our brain presents a beautiful example of open architecture. Thanks to this design, we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.

Thus the reading brain is part of highly successful two-way dynamics. Reading can be learned only because of the brain's plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually. For example, at the neuronal level, a person who learns to read in Chinese uses a very particular set of neuronal connections that differ in significant ways from the pathways used in reading English. When Chinese readers first try to read in English, their brains attempt to use Chinese-based neuronal pathways. The act of learning to read Chinese characters has literally shaped the Chinese reading brain. Similarly, much of how we think and what we think about is based on insights and associations generated from what we read. As the author Joseph Epstein put it, "A biography of any literary person ought to deal at length with what he read and when, for in some sense, we are what we read."

These two dimensions of the reading brain's development and evolution—the personal-intellectual and the biological—are rarely described together, but there are critical and wonderful lessons to be discovered in doing just that. In this book I use the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust as metaphor and the largely underappreciated squid as analogy for two very different aspects of reading. Proust saw reading as a kind of intellectual "sanctuary," where human beings have access to thousands of different realities they might never encounter or understand otherwise. Each of these new realities is capable of transforming readers' intellectual lives without ever requiring them to leave the comfort of their armchairs.

Scientists in the 1950s used the long central axon of the shy but cunning squid to . . .

Proust and the Squid
The Story and Science of the Reading Brain. Copyright © by Maryanne Wolf. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc. All rights reserved. Available now wherever books are sold.

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