Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf
The interesting thing about “the reading brain” is that there isn’t one. That is: we’re hard-wired for things like vision, speech and emotion, but not reading; reading is a very recent development in evolutionary terms (only a few thousand years old) and each child has to learn it from scratch. For about 60% of kids learning to read is very arduous work, and for 10-15% of all kids (including dyslexics) learning to read is one of the hardest things they will ever learn.
Reading – the importance of it, and whether or not people are doing it – is in the news these days. President Obama recently took a swipe at technology in a commencement address
“WITH iPods and iPads and Xboxes and PlayStations—none of which I know how to work—information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment.”
as The Economist noted, he was echoing Socrates, who had a deep distrust of of written language and teaching through reading. Socrates was convinced that the oral tradition of his time was the only path to true knowledge. His fear was that students would learn how to parrot information through reading but not fully understand the ideas. Now, we’re afraid that kids are getting information through the internet etc. and won’t get ideas from books anymore.
Author Maryann Wolf is not in Socrates’ camp, although she’d find common ground with President Obama: she wants information to be a tool of empowerment too. As a reviewer noted, the title of Maryann Wolf’s book “Proust and the Squid” is reference to the French novelist’s description of reading as an intellectual “sanctuary” and to the use of the squid brain for neurological research in the 1950s. These seemingly unrelated symbols are meant to indicate Wolf’s approach to writing this book. She marries the cultural-historical (referred to by the former) with the biological to paint a well-rounded picture of reading and reading disabilities.
This is a fascinating book. It has three areas:
Early history of how our species learned to read, from the time of the Sumerians to Socrates;
Development of humans as they learned 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.
Specifically, Wolf (as a professor of child development and a neurologist, and the parent of a dyslexic) is interested in dyslexics and how they process information versus students and readers who do not struggle with decoding text on a page or screen. Besides the history and development aspects which are interesting by themselves, her research into the neuroscience of dyslexia could not be more relevant for us as the parents of a dyslexic child.
Especially in modern American society, where kids are pushed to read and learn at younger and younger ages, dyslexic kids have a hard time of it. As Wolf puts it,
Children with any form of dyslexia are not "dumb" or "stubborn"; nor are they "not working to potential" -- the three most frequent descriptions they endure. However, they will be mistakenly be described in these ways many times by many people, including themselves.
Indeed, they begin to be stigmatize and lose confidence at a very early age; in Malcolm’s case it was first grade when he couldn’t read the “chapter books” like other kids. The research shows that in most cases like his, it is not a cognitive issue per se: Most dyslexic kids have average to above-average in intelligence. As Wolf notes, it is primarily a brain development issue.
Thanks to advances in brain imaging techniques and research over the last twenty years, research can pinpoint what areas of the brain are being used when dyslexic (versus normal) readers are trying to read. Fascinatingly, they can also distinguish differences between brain activity of, say, a reader of phonogram-based English versus a a reader of logogram-based Chinese, who use different parts of the brain to read. Reading itself shapes the human brain; you literally “are what you read”.
Based on this research, Wolf writes, “a far more comprehensive understanding is beginning to emerge of what is going on when the brain can't learn to read.” In other words, dyslexic kids are wired differently. Certainly we can see that in our own son, who is strongly left-handed and left-oriented (both of us are right-handed) and exhibits most of the traits of a right-hemisphere dominated brain which controls the left side.
Wolf believes that we can use this information to accurately diagnose problems early, before dyslexic kids struggle and become stigmatized. In addition, her RAVE-O program (which stands for Retrieval, Automaticity, Vocabulary, Engagement with Language, Orthography) has shown very promising (but still early) clinical results in helping dyslexic kids attain fluency and ultimately automaticity (effortless reading). This is a BIG deal for dyslexic kids: automaticity in reading and writing is precisely what non-dyslexic kids can do, and what all kids need in order to progress in school.
Now, I should mention that this book isn’t the most well-written. For a lay reader, it is rather dense. But the subject matter is so engrossing and the breadth so great that it becomes, well, gripping, at least for a parent with an emotional stake in these questions like me. But I think anyone would find the book rewarding.
More information:
Reading Mind radio program with Dr. Wolf
How We Learn from To The Best of Our Knowledge radio program
Wolf’s Applied and Theoretical Research
