Proust and the Squid 15 Feb 10
I just finished a good book called “Proust and the Squid” by Maryanne
Wolf, a neuroscientist and child developmental psychologist. The book
is a brief overview of how the brain manages to read, how it evolved
to do so, and how it sometimes fails to read in the case of dyslexia.
I would recommend it – don’t let the stupid name put you off (The name
is only superficially related to the subject matter).
Wolf begins her exploration by meditating on a childhood love of
reading. Pairing her own recollections with a sentimental essay from
Marcel Proust about early forays into literary fantasy, she launches
into a description of the reading brain. She presents a summary of the
findings of modern neuroscience: brain scans suggest a novel
adaptation of ancient neural structures devoted to speech, spatial
recognition, and higher cognition. Autopsies of stroke victims reveal
severed links in the chain of reading comprehension. And the natural
history of childhood shows a progression from storytelling to decoding
of text to fluent comprehension to expert reading and going “beyond
the text.” The overall picture is of a human brain with no real
“reading center” but which has adapted through amazing plasticity to
accomplish automatically what took millions of years to develop:
experiencing another’s thoughts, mirrored through seemingly inert
symbols on paper.
As Wolf recounts, the transformation from oralcy to literacy took
place in the blink of an eye in evolutionary terms but over many
thousands of years of human history (In some societies reading never
developed at all). The author describes the development of visual
symbols, the alphabetic breakthrough, and Socrates’ vehement
objections to what he thought of as the hollow wisdom conveyed by
written texts.
The last third of “Proust and the Squid” addresses Wolf’s day-to-day
work as a child psychologist: what happens when the brain can’t learn
to read. Multiple lines of evidence point to several theories, not all
of which are incompatible with each other. In essence, the dyslexic
brain has failed to co-opt the necessary neural circuitry for fluent
reading. But it may possess strengths in other areas due to the
brain’s tendency to compensate. Whether there is an evolutionary basis
for the rather high prevalence of dyslexia is the subject of brief
speculation at the end of the book.
I would recommend “Proust and the Squid.” It is a brief treatment of
the reading brain that will interest anyone who loves to read and is
curious about reading’s cognitive and historical basis.
pseudoisaac 