Saturday November 29, 2008 6:00 am Lethbridge

It is +4 C with a high forecast of +7 C. Sunrise 8:05 Sunset 16:35 Hours of daylight: 8:30.
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This page last updated on: Sunday, November 30, 2008 8:28 AM

A. Morning Musings

I am feeling a-ok again and ready for the new day. Now to give a few minutes thought to it. I will begin with a cup of decaf coffee. This is a new trial for me. When I was ill a couple of days ago I had headaches in addition to the nausea, which I assume was due to caffeine withdrawal rather than the flu.

I do like something warm to sip on in the morning.

Literature: I am going to hold off identifying a fiction book for a couple of days and focus on non-fiction. The book by Maryane Wolf is the best book I have seen on the effect of reading on the human mind. I think it deserves a very slow and careful read with detailed notes.

Model Trains: At the moment I seem to have most matters well in hand. It has taken about 5 months (Jan - Feb, Sep - Nov) but I now appear to have a working operational layout. This was my original goal many years ago and it is a good feeling to have finally achieved it. The next step is to attach mobile sound decoders to my locomotives. I am waiting for 2 decoders to arrive from Tony's Train Exchange in the US. I assume the delay is due to some processing at the border. I thought they would have arrived by now. From now on I want to find a balance between running operational trains on my layout according to a timetable and switching list produced by Ship It! software and making small adjustments and improvements to various aspects of the hobby.

I will spend some time today in the basement running train #501 on its scheduled run from Jasper to Coaldale. This will involve taking an empty boxcar and 2 empty hopper cars from Jasper to Coaldale. Along the way it will pick up a loaded hopper car of coal from the Mercoal Mines in Black Diamond and set it out at Dusty Coal and Cartage in Prairie Dog. While in Prairie Dog it will pick up an empty boxcar from Hillside Lumber as well as an empty hopper car from Dusty Coal and Cartaage. Then it will stop in Queenston to pick up an empty boxcar from Queeston Cartage and an empty reefer from Swift Meats. Finally, when it arrives in Coaldale it will set out the two empty boxcars.

Geocaching: It is time to return to this activity. I will have a look at the geocaching.com web site and select a couple of caches in the river valley for a pleasant hike in the woods. Make that one cache. There is a new one on the west side of the coulee in the area near the par 3 golf course. The terrain is rated as a 4, so this promises to be a challenge. It has been found once so far.

Learning Category	Planned Activities for Today	Time
Psychology	Continue reading "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Wolf	1 hr
Model Trains	Begin an operational running session for Train #501	1 hr
Geocaching	Look for GC1JD5J in west Lethbridge	2 hr

B. Actual Learning Activities

8:00 am

Notes on "Proust and the Squid"

Dale Burnett

These notes will follow my system of making note of important points and then adding a reflective comment in a tan colored box.

The first goal is to get a clear sense of the overall structure of the book. This is done by carefully examining the table of contents. But I do not want to bog down with details at the outset. Therefore the table is incomplete.

Wolf, M. (2007). Proust and the Squid.

Part I: How the Brain Learned to Read

Part 2: How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time

Part 3: When the Brain Can't Learn to Read

Each of these 3 parts contains 3 chapters. A nice balance. Symmetry.

The first part is about the evolution of the brain, particularly since the first beginnings of symbolic representation.
The second part is about what happens within the brain of a single individual as he/she learns to read.
The third part is about what happens when the brain fails to read.

Let's have a look at the 3 chapters in the first part.

Chapter 1. Reading Lessons From Proust and the Squid

Chapter 2. How the Brain Adapted Itself to Read: The First Writing Systems

Chapter 3: The Birth of an Alphabet and Socrate's Protests

I am not sure about the content of the first chapter, based on the title. Clearly squids can't read. But maybe that is the point - we are somehow different from them. It is also the title of the book, and one of the reasons I bought it. To clear up the ambiguity.

The remaining two chapters appear to be straight forward. Reading is related to writing and writing is related to the alphabet. I am also familiar with Socrates' concern that reading/writing would weaken our ability to remember as we would no longer have to rely on our memory alone.

Let's try to make a few notes on the first chapter.

Chapter 1. Reading Lessons From Proust and the Squid

"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 brains, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species." [p. 3]

A great introduction to the chapter! It helps set the context for the remainder of the book.

What other inventions come to mind? Mathematics. Religion. Nations.

Suppose one were to reword the first sentence to say "We were never born to think." That sounds wrong. Almost all life forms that have a well-developed nervous system and brain seem to be able to think. Thinking is related to adaptability and survival. Is reading related to adaptability and survival? I think it is.

But Wolf's point is that the brain has been altered because of its ability to read. Is this also true of mathematics? Religion? Nationality?

"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 evolution, such as vision and spoken language." [p. 5]

I should have thought of spoken language!

"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. ... 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. ... Scientists in the 1950's used the long central axon of the shy but cunning squid to understand how neurons fire and transmit to each other ... " [p. 6]

That clears up the title of the book.

Wolf mentions that Proust wrote a book called "On Reading". I would like to find this. The university library does not have it. This may turn out to be a fun search. There is a copy at the University of Alberta. Now to see if I can obtain it via interlibrary loan. I can at the Lethbridge Public Library but not at the U of L Library (alumni do not have interlibrary loan privileges).

"While reading we can leave our own consciousness, and pass over into the consciousness of another person, another age, another culture." [p. 7]
"... 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." [p. 8]
"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." [p. 8]
"the cognitive scientist David Swinney ... discovered that the brain doesn't just find one simple meaning for a word; instead it stimulates a veritable trove of knowledge about that word and the many words related to it." [p. 9]
"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 repetoire 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." [p. 9]

The same principle applies to adults.
"All human behaviors rest on layers on layers of teeming, underlying activity." [p. 10]
"In other words, all human behaviors are based on multiple cognitive processes, which are based on the rapid integration of information from very specific neurological structures, which rely on billions of neurons capable of trillions of possible connections, which are programmed in large part by genes. ... neurons need instructions from genes about how to form efficient circuits or pathways among the neurological structures." [p. 10]

"... there are no genes specific only to reading ... This is part of what makes reading - and any cultural invention - different from other processes, and why it does not come as naturally to our children as vision or spoken language, which are preprogrammed." [p. 11]

This is great fun. I am thoroughly enjoying making these notes. This process of slowing down the reading and thinking about each paragraph, often each sentence, and then regurgitating it onto these notes, really makes a difference in my neuronal structures. Much more so than simply reading it, nodding my head, and saying that I follow the argument.

Tags: psychology, reading