Proust and the Squid part I

Blog 1 (I know the first one was really blog 1, but I don’t think it counted all that much)

First, the facts:

Proust and the Squid (she explains why in the first chapter)

The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

By Maryanne Wolf

Copyright 2007 by Maryanne Wolf

Published by HarperCollins Publishers

The author, Maryanne Wolf breaks her book into nine chapters and categorizes the chapters into three parts. While I won’t go into the names of each chapter ahead of time, I do think it is interesting to note the Part titles.

Part I: How the Brain Learned to Read

Part II: How the Brain Learns to Read Over Time

Part III: When the Brain Can’t Learn to Read.

Next some impressions:

Now, I know what you are probably thinking… ”yeah this sounds like a real fun read”. But believe me, this is a well written book and doesn’t come across as overly, hurt-my-head-with-numbers-and-graphs, scientific.

Now my approach:

Since I have to write ten blogs and this book is divided into nine chapters I will blog as I go. I will attempt to briefly summarize the main points of the chapter and relate it in some way to whatever framing questions seem to apply. I will also editorialize with my thoughts and feelings and generally attempt wit in my presentation.

Part I: How the Brain Learned to Read (that’s history people and it goes back some 4,000+ years)

Chapter 1: Reading Lessons from Proust and the Squid.

So I know you are all dying to know why Proust and why the Squid. Ms. Wolf lets us in pretty quick. She chose Proust because of his eloquent, lovely and intellectually deep writing (there are quotes from him scattered throughout) and the squid because in the 1950’s scientists studied squids’ brains in an effort to understand human brains and brain plasticity.

Ms. Wolf: The act of reading is a two part process; Biological and Intellectual.

The Squid represents Biology and Proust represents Intellectual…ness.

First the Biological (or rather Social): Essentially the mere fact that we can read and write is INCREDIBLE. The ability to read/write is not a foregone biological conclusion of every infant from birth. We have to learn it. And it is a social construct transferred to us starting at birth by our family and teachers as a reading/writing “Discourse” (ahhhhh, Gee theory, my brain hurts). The type of reading you and I are doing this very moment is based on the “alphabetic principle” and we owe that principle to the ancient Greeks some 2,000 years ago. The alphabetic principle basically says: there is an alphabet consisting of letters that represent sounds. Those letters are strung together in a categorized way to represent more complex sounds that become words. The words themselves represent objects or ideas and can, in turn, be strung together in even more complex ways to form more complex sounds that become sentences which can represent a whole slew of different meanings and systems of thought and theories and manifestoes and ideologies etc…etc… From what we understand, the Greeks owe their invention of the “alphabetic principle” to earlier more picto-graphic efforts by the Sumerians, Egyptians and Cretes, some 2,000 years before. And (to skip to the next chapter a little bit) the Sumerians etc…owe what they learned to tens of twenties of thousands of years of experimentation by other cultures before them.

NOW Biological: From birth, sight is programmed into our genetic makeup; we will see. Hearing is programmed into tour genetic makeup; we will listen. Even language is programmed into our genetic makeup; we WILL talk even if we have to invent our own words for things. But in order to learn to read and write, our brains have to adapt a slew of different and complex systems and mold them to the task of reading/writing (and the book goes into some detail about what those different processes are). But the main biological idea in a nut-shell is:

We actually physically alter our brains in order to learn to read and write –physically ALTER our own brains. We change our brains to make meaning of patterns of lines and dots on paper. If we didn’t learn to read when we were kids, our very own brains would be DIFFERENT brains today from what they are! WE CHANGE OUR BRAINS — AHHHHHHHH!!!!! CRAZY!

That obviously makes my head spin with wonderment.

Finally, Intellectually: There were some really cool things Ms. Wolf highlights in regards to the intellectual pursuit of reading. The main one, however, is that reading is an individual experience and that our minds wander when we read and that is a good thing. When we read, we bring all our own experiences and thoughts and ideas to the intellectual table and telescope the ideas in the book to create our own ideas. The act of reading becomes a process that opens our minds to new thoughts and broadens us to new experiences that don’t necessarily have to be ours first hand.

Ms. Wolf closed her chapter with some trepidation about how reading is changing in the digital age and stated her concern that with more information instantly at our fingertips, we are not cultivating the same kind of deep thought that reading books can facilitate. She made an interesting observation that perhaps kids now are altering their brains in a different way to learn a different type of reading that how people have been historically altering their reading brains.

I will close this blog with the same quote by Proust that Ms. Wolf opened her book with.

“I believe that reading, in its original essence, (is) that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude” – Marcel Proust