Proust and the Squid

Maryanne Wolf

• Editorial: Harper Perennial
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780062010636
• Categoría: Education
• Categoría: Teaching Methods for Reading

"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

How do people learn to read and write—and how has the development of these skills transformed the brain and the world itself? Neuropsychologist and child development expert Maryann Wolf answers these questions in this ambitious and provocative book that chronicles the remarkable journey of written language not only throughout our evolution but also over the course of a single child's life, showing why a growing percentage have difficulty mastering these abilities.

With fascinating down-to-earth examples and lively personal anecdotes, Wolf asserts that the brain that examined the tiny clay tablets of the Sumerians is a very different brain from the one that is immersed in today's technology-driven literacy, in which visual images on the screen are paving the way for a reduced need for written language—with potentially profound consequences for our future.

PART I

HOW the BRAIN LEARNED to READ

Words and music are the tracks of human evolution.

—JOHN S. DUNNE

Knowing how something originated often is the best clue to how it works.

—TERRENCE DEACON

Chapter 1

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 human beings 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 understand how neurons fire and transmit to each other, and in some cases to see how neurons repair and compensate when something goes awry. At a different level of study, cognitive neuroscientists today investigate how various cognitive (or mental) processes work in the brain. Within this research, the reading process offers an example par excellence of a recently acquired cultural invention that requires something new from existing structures in the brain. The study of what the human brain has to do to read, and of its clever ways of adapting when things go wrong, is analogous to the study of the squid in earlier neuroscience.

Proust’s sanctuary and the scientist’s squid represent complementary ways of understanding different dimensions in the reading process. Let me introduce you more concretely to the approach of this book by having you read two of Proust’s breath-defying sentences from his book On Reading, as fast as you can.

There are perhaps no days of our childhood we lived so fully as those . . . we spent with a favorite book. Everything that filled them for others, so it seemed, and that we dismissed as a vulgar obstacle to a divine pleasure: the game for which a friend would come to fetch us at the most interesting passage; the troublesome bee or sun ray that forced us to lift our eyes from the page or to change position; the provisions for the afternoon snack that we had been made to take along and that we left beside us on the bench without touching, while above our head the sun was diminishing in force in the blue sky; the dinner we had to return home for, and during which we thought only of going up immediately afterward to finish the interrupted chapter, all those things with which reading should have kept us from feeling anything but annoyance, on the contrary they have engraved in us so sweet a memory (so much more precious to our present judgment than what we read then with such love), that if we still happen today to leaf through those books of another time, it is for no other reason than that they are the only calendars we have kept of days that have vanished, and we hope to see reflected on their pages the dwellings and the ponds which no longer exist.

Consider first what you were thinking while reading this passage, and then try to analyze exactly what you did as you read it, including how you began to connect Proust to other thoughts. If you are like me, Proust conjured up your own long-stored memories of books: the secret places you found to read away from the intrusions of siblings and friends; the thrilling sensations elicited by Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, and Mark Twain; the muffled beam of the flashlight you hoped your parent wouldn’t notice beneath the sheets. This is Proust’s reading sanctuary, and it is ours. It is where we first learned to roam without abandon through Middle Earth, Lilliput, and Narnia. It is the place we first tried on the experiences of those we would never meet: princes and paupers, dragons and damsels, !Kung warriors, and a German-Jewish girl hiding in a Dutch attic from Nazi soldiers.

It is said that Machiavelli would sometimes prepare to read by dressing up in the period of the writer he was reading and then setting a table for the two of them. This was his sign of respect for the author’s gift, and perhaps of Machiavelli’s tacit understanding of the sense of encounter that Proust described. While reading, we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture. “Passing over,” a term used by the theologian John Dunne, describes the process through which reading enables us to try on, identify with, and ultimately enter for a brief time the wholly different perspective of another person’s consciousness. When we pass over into how a knight thinks, how a slave feels, how a heroine behaves, and how an evildoer can regret or deny wrongdoing, we never come back quite the same; sometimes we’re inspired, sometimes saddened, but we are always enriched. Through this exposure we learn both the commonality and the uniqueness of our own thoughts—that we are individuals, but not alone.

The moment this happens, we are no longer limited by the confines of our own thinking. Wherever they were set, our original boundaries are challenged, teased, and gradually placed somewhere new. An expanding sense of “other” changes who we are, and, most importantly for children, what we imagine we can be.

Let’s go back to what you did when I asked you to switch your attention from this book to Proust’s passage and to read as fast as you could without losing Proust’s meaning. In response to this request, you engaged an array of mental or cognitive processes: attention; memory; and visual, auditory, and linguistic processes. Promptly, your brain’s attentional and executive systems began to plan how to read Proust speedily and still understand it. Next, your visual system raced into action, swooping quickly across the page, forwarding its gleanings about letter shapes, word forms, and common phrases to linguistic systems awaiting the information. These systems rapidly connected subtly differentiated visual symbols with essential information about the sounds contained in words. Without a single moment of conscious awareness, you applied highly automatic rules about the sounds of letters in the English writing system, and used a great many linguistic processes to do so. This is the essence of what is called the alphabetic principle, and it depends on your brain’s uncanny ability to learn to connect and integrate at rapid-fire speeds what it sees and what it hears to what it knows.

As you applied all these rules to the print before you, you activated a battery of relevant language and comprehension processes with a rapidity that still astounds researchers. To take one example from the language domain, when you read the 233 words in Proust’s passage, your word meaning, or semantic, systems contributed every possible meaning of each word you read and incorporated the exact correct meaning for each word in its context. This is a far more complex and intriguing process than one might think. Years ago, the cognitive scientist David Swinney helped uncover the fact that when we read a simple word like “bug,” we activate not only the more common meaning (a crawling, six-legged creature), but also the bug’s less frequent associations—spies, Volkswagens, and glitches in software. Swinney discovered that the brain doesn’t find just one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it. The richness of this semantic dimension of reading depends on the riches we have already stored, a fact with important and sometimes devastating developmental implications for our children. Children with a rich repertoire of words and their associations will experience any text or any conversation in ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts.

Think about the implications of Swinney’s finding for texts as simple as Dr. Seuss’s Oh, The Places You’ll Go! or as semantically complex as James Joyce’s Ulysses. Children who have never left the narrow boundaries of their neighborhood, either figuratively or literally, may understand this book in entirely different ways from other children. We bring our entire store of meanings to whatever we read—or not. If we apply this finding to the passage from Proust that you just read, it means that your executive planning system directed a great many activities to ensure that you comprehended what was there, and retrieved all your personal associations to the text. Your grammatical system had to work overtime to avoid stumbling over Proust’s unfamiliar sentence constructions, like his use of long clauses strung together by many commas and semicolons before the predicate. To accomplish all this without forgetting what you already read fifty words back, your semantic and grammatical systems had to function closely with your working memory. (Think of this type of memory as a kind of “cognitive blackboard,” which temporarily stores information for you to use in the near term.) Proust’s unusually sequenced grammatical information had to be connected to the meanings of individual words without losing track of the overall propositions and context of the passage.

As you linked all this linguistic and conceptual information, you generated your own inferences and hypotheses based on your own background knowledge and engagement. If this cumulative information failed to make sense, you might have reread some parts to ensure that they fit within the given context. Then, after you integrated all this visual, conceptual, and linguistic information with your background knowledge and inferences, you arrived at an understanding of what Proust was describing: a glorious day in childhood made timeless through the “divine pleasure” that is reading!

Then, some of you paused at the end of Proust’s passage and went somewhere beyond what the text provided. But before tackling this more philosophical point, let’s turn back to the biological dimension and look immediately below the surface of the behavioral act of reading. All human behaviors rest on layers on layers of teeming, underlying activity. I asked the neuroscientist and artist Catherine Stoodley of Oxford to draw a pyramid to illustrate how these various levels operate together when we read a single word (Figure 1-1). In the top layer of this pyramid, reading the word “bear” is the surface behavior; below it is the cognitive level, which consists of all those basic attentional, perceptual, conceptual, linguistic, and motor processes you just used to read. These cognitive processes, which many psychologists spend their entire lives studying, rest on tangible neurological structures that are made...