Maryanne Wolf - Proust and the Squid

I dedicate this book to all the members

of my family... past, present, and still to come

I HAVE LIVED MY LIFE IN THE SERVICE OF WORDS: finding where they hide in the convoluted recesses of the brain, studying their layers of meaning and form, and teaching their secrets to the young. In these pages I invite you to ponder the profoundly creative quality at the heart of reading words. Nothing in our intellectual development should be less taken for granted at this moment in history, as the transition to a digital culture accelerates its pace.

This is particularly so because there has also never been a time when the complex beauty of the reading process stood more revealed, when the magnitude of its contributions was more clearly understood by science, or when these contributions seemed more in danger of being replaced by new forms of communication. Examining what we have and reflecting on what we want to preserve are the leitmotifs of these pages.

To truly understand what we do when we read would be, as the fin de sicle scholar Sir Edmund Huey memorably wrote long ago, the acme of a psychologists achievements, for it would be to describe very many of the most intricate workings of the human mind, as well as to unravel the tangled story of the most remarkable specific performance that civilization has learned in all its history. Informed by areas of study as varied as evolutionary history and cognitive neuroscience, our contemporary knowledge about the reading brain would have dazzled Huey. We know that each new type of writing system was developed through millennia of human history, and required different adaptations of the human brain; we know that the multifaceted development of reading extends from infancy to ever-deepening levels of expertise; and we know that the curious mix of challenge and gift to be found in dyslexiain which the brain struggles to learn to readcontains insights that are transforming our understanding of reading. Together, these areas of knowledge illuminate the brains nearly miraculous capacity to rearrange itself to learn to read, and in the process to form new thoughts.

In this book I hope to push you gently toward reconsidering things you might long have taken for grantedsuch as how natural it is for a child to learn to read. In the evolution of our brains capacity to learn, the act of reading is not natural, with consequences both marvelous and tragic for many people, particularly children.

To narrate this book demands a set of perspectives that have taken me many years to prepare for. I am a teacher of child development and cognitive neuroscience; a researcher of language, reading, and dyslexia; a parent of children you will learn about; and an apologist for written language. I direct a research center, the Center for Reading and Language Research, in the Eliot-Pearson Department of Child Development at Tufts University in Boston, where my colleagues and I conduct research on readers of all ages, particularly those with dyslexia. Together, we study what it means to be dyslexic in languages around the world, from languages that share roots with Englishlike German, Spanish, Greek, and Dutchto less related languages like Hebrew, Japanese, and Chinese. We know the toll that not learning to read takes on children regardless of their native language, whether in struggling Filipino communities, on Native American reservations, or in affluent Boston suburbs. Many of our efforts explore the design of new interventions and the effects of these interventions on behaviors in the classroom and in the brain. Thanks to imaging technology, we can actually see how the brain reads before and after our work is done.

The sum of these experiences, the amount of research available, and the recognition of societys shift into new modes of communication compelled me to write my first book for the general public. I am, it must be said, still becoming accustomed to a style where there is no immediate reference to the many scholars whose research underlies so much of this book. I earnestly hope the reader will take advantage of the extensive notes and references that accompany each chapter.

The book begins by celebrating the beauty, variety, and transformative capacities of the origins of writing; proceeds to the dramatic new landscapes of the development of the reading brain and its various pathways to acquisition; and ends with difficult questions about the virtues and dangers in what lies ahead.

Oddly enough, a preface often presents the authors final thoughts to the reader on finishing the book. This book is no exception. But rather than end with my own words, I wish to use those from the gentle curator of Marilynne Robinsons Gilead, as he gave his best writings to his young son: I wrote almost all of it in the deepest hope and conviction. Sifting my thoughts and choosing my words. Trying to say what was true. And Ill tell you frankly, that was wonderful.