Sunday November 30, 2008 6:15 am Lethbridge

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

Part I: How the Brain Learned to Read

Chapter 1. Reading Lessons From Proust and the Squid

• Wolf references the French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene for using the idea of "neuronal recycling" saying, "Dehaene and his colleagues argue that our ability to recognize words in reading uses the species' evolutionarily older circuitry that is specialized for object recognition." [p. 12]

  Dehaene's book, "The Number Sense" (1997) is the best book I have read on how the brain learns about numbers and mathematics.

• "When confronted, therefore, with the task of inventing functions like literacy and numeracy, our brain had at its disposal three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity of form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns in information; and the ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these areas automatically. In one way or another, these three principles of brain organization are the foundation for all of reading's evolution, development, and failure." [p. 12]

  A superb summary of the key neurological basis for thought.

• "Visual cells possess the capacity to become highly specialized and highly specific, and to make new circuits among preexisting structures. ... Because of this design feature in our visual system, called retinotopic organization, every line, diagonal, circle, or arc seen by the retina in the eye activates a specific, specialized location in the occipital lobes in a split second." [p. 12 - 13]
  
  
• "Dehaene suggests that the visual areas in our ancestors' brains responsible for object recognition were used to decipher the first symbols and letters of written language by adapting their built-in system for recognition." [p. 13 - 14]
  
  
• "In much the way reading reflects the brain's capacity for going beyond the original design of its structures, it also reflects the reader's capacity to go beyond what is given by the text and the author." [p. 15]

  Thus we all read a different book. What is amazing is that we still have enough commonality to share the experience.

• "By using indirect approaches, Proust and Monet force their readers and viewers to contribute actively to the constructions themselves, and in the process to experience them more directly." [p. 17]

  Yes! Much modern prose now follows this principle. Authors often use pronouns with only subtle cues that help the reader infer who is being described, thus requiring the reader to continually reevaluate their understanding of the text. Yet most of our pedagogy ignores this principle. We try to explain everything clearly and in so doing take the excitement and ambiguity away from the learner. No wonder most textbooks, and many lessons, are boring. And ineffective, except in a negative way.

• "Each major type of writing invented by our ancestors demanded something a little different from the brain, and this may explain why more than 2,000 years elapsed between these earliest known writing systems and the remarkable, almost perfect aphabet developed by the ancient Greeks." [p. 18]
  
  
• "Learning to read begins the first time an infant is held and read a story. How often this happens, or fails to happen, in the first five years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading." [p. 20]

  This certainly is true for our family.

• Wolf then asks some fascinating questions about the future of our symbolic development. "What is being lost and what is being gained for so many young people who have largely replaced books with the multidimensioned 'continuous partial attention' culture of the Internet? What are the implications of seemingly limitless information for the evolution of the reading-brain and for us as a species? Does the rapid, almost instantaneous presentation of expansive information threaten the more time-demanding formation of in-depth knowledge?" [p. 22]

  My various approaches that fall under the umbrella term "slow reading", and which involve various ways of making notes such as these, are one way in which the technology might be used to foster a blend of old (i.e. text) and new (i.e. multimedia). As I said only yesterday, "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." It has taken me two days (actually about 3 hours) to "slow read" just one chapter of 20 pages. But the effect is so much more valuable than the 20 minutes it took me to read this chapter a couple of weeks ago. What I really learned from the rapid reading was that this book was worth reading slowly. This is a principle that many educators are familiar with: there are many ways to read, and many ways to learn, and that the choice depends upon the material and the personal history of the individual. But familiarity with such meta-learning principles is also something that should be part of each learner's repetoire. We all need to be aware of the variety of tools at our disposal.

Tags: psychology, reading