Proust and the Squid - Maryanne Wolf

Well I finally finished reading Proust and the Squid, by Maryanne Wolf. Dr. Wolf is a professor of child development at Tufts University and the director of the Center for Reading and Language Research. The book is about the magic (and in the case of dyslexia, tragic) process of learning to read, and what this tells us about the changes happening as the so called digital natives develop new skills for a new medium.

Dr. Wolf spends a lot of time describing what happens in the brain as we learn to read. She notes that while our brains are genetically programmed to learn language, it is not hard-wired for reading of any kind. She traces the long history of the development of writing (and thus, reading). It took about 2,000 years to develop from little scratch marks for accounting into complete writing systems. In the course of that time, our ancestors slowly reassigned portions of their brains to be dedicated for reading purposes. And all of that development is repeated each time a child learns to read and write, learning the basics of that 2,000 year achievement in about 2,000 days.

Using MRIs to create images of the brain’s activity reading researchers have pinpointed the portions of the brain used when a beginner learns to recognize letters, then to know the associated sounds, to string them together and finally to become a fluent and an expert reader. Interestingly, the parts of the brain used can vary depending on whether the language is an alphabet-based, phonetic writing system like English, Spanish or Hebrew, or a character-based writing system like Chinese or Japanese kanji. This leads to a situation where a bilingual man, fluent in both Chinese and English, could suffer a stroke, and lose the ability to read Chinese, but still be able to read in English!

Dr. Wolf talks about the issues of dyslexia, and notes that different problems or combinations of problems arise in different language speakers’ reading difficulties. She writes with a real sympathy and compassion of the very real trauma that occurs when a child does not learn to read on schedule. She has very important things to say about how to tailor teaching and societal expectations to catch dyslexic students before they learn to believe that they are stupid. If you are looking for a retirement project or have a loved one with reading problems, I highly recommend reading her chapters on dyslexia. For instance, the vocabulary of a child consistently read to from toddler age on, is vastly larger and more sophisticated than that of a five-year old who has not been read to. The read-to child is much more reading-ready than the other, and that head start shows at every step of learning to read, marking those children not read to for very nearly certain disaster.

But the reason I picked up the book is her discussion of how our understanding of what happens in a reading brain should inform our considerations of how to teach digital natives to make the most of new technology while not losing the benefits of thousands of years of reading.