Proust and the Squid

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

Author: Maryanne Wolf

Publisher: Icon Books 2010 (First published 2008)

ISBN: 978-1-84831-030-8

Pages: 229

A deserving book from a cognitive neuroscientist researching in child development, it tries to reveal the secrets behind the act of reading – how it developed in humans, what changes it brought inside the brains, and how it paved the way for the surge in information dispersal around the corners of the world. Wolf is a professor in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University. She holds the John DiBaggio Chair of Citizenship and Public Service and is the director of the Centre for Reading and Language Research. Coming on the heels of being a researcher on child development, the author’s first son developed dyslexia, a form of reading disorder, which urged her to tackle the issue with a determination few would possess. The book is endowed with inputs from various branches of knowledge like history, neuroscience, brain mapping and psychology. The strange title attempts to focus on the measure of incongruity existing between the two extreme figures of Marcel Proust, a renowned French author and the squid, which is an underwater animal, obviously incapable of reading. Proust once remarked that Reading is the miracle of communication in the midst of solitude.

Man is the only species evolved to have the facility of reading. Surprisingly, we don’t possess any genetic framework for reading, or by extension, to writing. There are no genes for these features, like they do for speech, cognition or vision. When reading and writing was invented about 6000 years ago, man was stepping into a new world of unnatural effectiveness. The existing regions of the brain, designed for quite different functions were recruited to perform reading and gain information from it. The brain thus become reorganized, making it suitable for forming new thought patterns and better survival potential in a society teeming with competing individuals. Since reading is not the result of genetic machinery, this trait cannot be inherited from parents. Each child is required to develop this talent anew. The neuronal associations readers make in their brains differ, based on the nature of language they use. The brain wiring put in place by Chinese readers are different from English readers, since Chinese is a logosyllabic language. The failure to form the associations of neuron result in dyslexia, a reading disorder found in quite a large proportion of the people.

Tokens marked on stone were the first reading material used by ancient people, often for accounting purposes. By using these cryptic symbols, a novel form of neuronal connectivity began to form in brain, which developed to handle more complex and varied inputs. By late 4^th millennium, cuneiform script emerged in Sumer, which revolutionized the way information was carried. The transition from pictographic symbols to logographic (depicting concepts) letters provided a turning point in human history. Cognitive and logical capabilities developed over generations. It formed the prototype for languages around the world. Even though not related in any way, modern Chinese is the nearest relative in architecture to the ancient Sumerian language. Numerous dialects and variations of the base tongue soon came to evolve, with women in the palace using a quite different tongue of their own! Writing systems also developed independently in Egypt, Crete and Mesoamerica. By 8^th century BCE, the Greek alphabet came into being, helped in no small measure by Phoenician influence, who had a very ancient writing system of their own. The Greek alphabet reproduced sounds of words, hence number of symbols reduced. This freed the minds from allocating a great amount of working memory for cognition, paving the way for great thoughts to arise, bypassing carefully remembered oral traditions. Wolf says this helped the flowering of classical period in Greece. Powerful opponents decried the use of written language. Socrates passionately disapproved of it, arguing that the written words are immutable, conferring a false sense of truth to them. His disciple, Plato was ambivalent to writing – we owe our knowledge of Socrates’ speeches through Plato’s writing. Plato’s glorious disciple, Aristotle, immersed headlong into reading. Socrates’ tirades against writing found echoes in ancient India as well, as the written word were supposed to destroy memory power and the loss of control of language, with its fine intonations and stresses for orators. Ancient Sanskrit scholars too valued oral tradition as the truest vehicle for intellectual and spiritual growth. In the present century, we fear the digital revolution for whisking away cognitive power from children, much as Socrates feared more than 2000 years before.

Exposure to reading – in the form of stories read to them – is essential for children to develop reading skills and acquire vocabulary later on. Learning multiple languages cause strain on the capabilities, but if it occurs at an early age, the brain easily adapts to it. Neural scans indicate the brains of such bilingual people show similar activity to native monolingual speakers. There are several stages of reading development in children to adulthood, namely, pre-reading reader, novice reader, decoding reader, fluent comprehending reader and expert reader. Brain activity is different for all these classes, with some form of automaticity developing in the later stages. The book is also gifted with a good discussion on dyslexia. New developments in neuroscience is given in support of the arguments. Affected persons use the right hemisphere of the brain, which is usually used for creative purposes in normally abled people, but which is not suitable for precision, which reading demands. The use of the right part and the delays in coordination between the two hemispheres result in reading disabilities. This problem should be properly addressed by teachers when handling children of impressionable ages. There is no one size fits all approach to instruction today. We need teachers with a toolbox of principles which can be applied based on children’s needs.

The book exudes confidence and earnest effort to guide reading-disabled children to the path of being successful in life. Having the history of dyslexia running deep in the author’s own family, and being the mother of a dyslexic child, she is rightfully diligent in her arguments to show to the world what needs to be done in such cases, instead of the humiliation and isolation of such children.

The book is unfortunately not good for casual reading. With copious inputs from doctoral fellows, it rarely becomes one. The Notes section at the end of the text occupies a quarter of the entire book, revealing its true colours. A serious drawback is the title which confuses readers. While claiming to be a history of reading and the development of brain for this feat, it diverts its attention to describing nuances of teaching children how to read. Many people would definitely desist from taking the book if the nature of content was more discernible – certainly myself among them. Readers are compelled to wade through the profusion of learning behaviours of children. Though a lot of illustrations are provided, they are handdrawn and not much illuminating. It seemed that they are included just for its own sake. Also, too much reliance on anecdotal evidence mars the scientific rigour of the work.

The book is not recommended for general readers.

Rating: 2 Star