Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

Wolf, M., & Stoodley, C. J. (2007). Proust and the squid: The story and science of the reading brain. HarperCollins.Maryanne Wolf is a scholar, teacher, and advocate for children and literacy. She is the Director of the Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners, and Social Justice at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies. Besides this, she grew up in Eldorado, Illinois, near where I grew up, another southern Illinois girl!!Reading is my favorite thing, has been for as long as I remember. I pay attention to what people are reading on planes and have noticed: more people looking at their devices instead of reading; rarely do I see children reading books, instead they're watching shows or playing games on a device, thus, my gravitation toward Wolf's work as I consider the implications. Her goals included: the evolution of the reading brain development, how the young brain learns to read and how reading changes the brain, and what it means when a brain can't learn to read. Reading is something that has to be learned. Specifically, "each brain must learn to make new circuits by connecting older [brain] regions originally designed and genetically programmed for other things." Beginning with naming things, we learn the alphabet and the association of letters, sounds, names, and ultimately meaning; reading is a learned behavior that literally rewires the brain. Research, according to Wolf, clearly shows a connection between the amount of time a child spends listening to people reading and speaking which increases a child's reading level, increases vocabulary, and improves understanding of language. Exposure to stories and books also enhances emotional development, capacity for empathy, and the ability to put yourself in another person's shoes.Word poverty is a term used to describe how by 5 years of age, some children from impoverished-language environments have heard 32 million fewer words spoken to them than the average middle class child. This poverty places these children at a disadvantage from those who have a greater vocabulary.Dyslexia was cited as an example of how learning to read can go wrong for any number of reasons. Wolf said that there is no one form of dyslexia but instead a "continuum of developmental reading disabilities." Exposure to reading, conversation, and books from age 0 to 5 is essential in the way the brain is rewired towards reading learning.I'm concerned about the ubiquitous use of technology because I fundamentally believe that reading is beneficial. Wolf's research added a great deal to my understanding of what's at stake when people don't know how to read. She asserted that reading online is not the same and her next book Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World explores this assertion. I'm eager to dive in!!

In a sentence: Reading changes our mind and in doing so changes our reading in a compounding feedback loop that has literally rewired the human mind.Who should read it: Everyone, it's super interesting and if you're an avid reader who knows that reading is better than not reading this will give you a nice pat on the back and a great history of reading and our understanding of how the mind does what it does. If you love being pretentious this is a good book too, the author is full of it haha. Did you know Socrates was avidly against literacy and it's harm to the mind? I knew he was an annoying ass who his neighbors voted to have killed but didn't know about his objections the dangers reading had on wisdome.Proust: Author who captured the profound impact reading has on someone's lifeSquid: An old neurological metaphor for how neurons work.The book outlines the literal rewiring necessary for humans to learn how to read and how profound and different that is than other built in attributes our minds have.'this plasticity at the heart of the brain's design forms the basis for much of who we are, and who we might become'Throughout the book I'm struck by wondering how much more we could be doing to rewire our minds intentionally through systems like reading. How much can we do? To change our "open architecture" of the brain. What are we leaving on the table? And how much are we harming the kids who are being left out of this rewiring. Much like everything else we do this feedback loop seems to be part of the Matthew principle and the author talks much about this. The rich get rich the poor get poorer."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 brains plastic design, and when reading takes place, that individual brain is forever changed, both physiologically and intellectually."'we are what we read'The moment we become literate 'we are no longer limited by the confines of our own thinking''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 win ways that are substantively different from children who do not have the same stored words and concepts''we bring our entire store of meanings to whatever we read - or not''If there are no genes specific only to reading, and if our brain has to connect older structures for vision and language to learn this new skill, every child in every generation has a lot of work''owing largely to their environments, however, one child will acquire these essentials, the other will not''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 years of childhood turns out to be one of the best predictors of later reading''every child who learns to read someone else's thoughts and write his or her own repeats this cyclical, germinating relationship between written language and new thought, never before imagined''vygotsky observed that the very process of writing one's thoughts leads individuals to refine those thoughts and to discover new ways of thinking.' (does interacting with your personal LLM create a hyper feedback loop of this? Are we on the cusp of something new)'the association between hearing written language and feeling loved provides the best foundation for this long process, and no cognitive scientist or educational researcher could have designed a better one'Reading is essential to learning to understand someone else's mind, understanding someone else's life, feelings, experiences. Otherwise known as empathy (unless you're only reading the quran)She has a lovely little call to action about how we can diagnose and treat all reading disorders and it's only a matter of access that is holding us back, beautiful and idealistic but if you've ever been in a poor community and homes you know access ain't the problem brother. She says 'a level playing field for all children before they enter kindergarten should not be that difficult to achieve' the understatement of the millennium .Note: Look up Katie Overy, Catherine Moritz, Sasha Yampolsky research into Early Intervention based on rhythm, melody, and rhymeDecoding is necessary to reading but 'one of the biggest errors in reading instruction is the assumption that after Amelia finally decodes a word she knows what she is reading' 'decoding does NOT mean comprehension'Nightmare Fuel: 30 to 40 percent of children in the fourth grade do not become fully fluent readers with adequate comprehensionThe two greatest aids to fluent comprehension are explicit instruction by a child's teachers in major content areas and the child's own desire to read'having a richly connected, established vocabulary or semantic network is physically reflected in the brain''reading changes our lives an dour lives change our reading' its bidirectionalThe author spends a great deal of time on dyslexia, it's a mystery basically, it can be wiring, structural, connective, any number of things.'rapid automatized naming' (RAN) tasks are one of the best predictors of reading performance' some young children with severe reading disabilities come from such linguistically impoverished backgrounds that vocabulary plays a critical role' not shit, reading isn't genetic, its an environmental problem in almost all but the most severe disabilities. If we know how to treat nearly all cases of learning disabilities it means environment (parents and caretakers) are to blame. Stop protecting bad parentsIt is the oral word that first illuminates consciousness = Language IS cognitionTechnology: Their sights are narrowed to what they see and hear quickly and easily, and they have too little reason to think outside our newest, most sophisticated boxes. These students are not illiterate, but they may never become true expert readersWhat does the future hold? A nation of semi literate people incapable of reasoning beyond the customized LLM text in front of them designed to get them to act a certain way?

I would recommend this book to anyone who's interested in learning more about reading and the science behind it...really good book

Has many very interesting and possibly quite important insights into what we are allowing the Internet to do to our brains. Basically, we are coming to depend on well-digested factoids from the Web, rather than forcing ourselves to plough through more difficult material (also on the Web, but maybe several paiges deep on the search results), tha may require us to think more deeply about the material. We may never have to think again!Got a bit repetitive - and both the squid and Proust appear only briefly.

Very enlightening for both curious people and researchers!

La historia del lenguaje y la escritura como pocos han podido contarla. Apta para iniciados y curiosos. Una gran herramienta de enseñanza y para aprender lo valioso que es la lectura en la infancia.

Das ist ein sehr spannendes Buch, leider gibt es nichts vergleichbares in deutsch. Es kam ja antiquarisch aus USA, war aber gut erhalten und ist wirklich lesenswert. Der Titel ist ein schöner Hinweis auf den Inhalt, aber sicher nicht leicht verständlich. Das Buch hält aber, was der Titel verspricht.