William Leith

When people started to read and write, it was not seen universally as a good thing. On the contrary, some people, including Socrates, thought it might be terribly damaging, in the same way that many people today see computer games and text messages as damaging.
Socrates came from a culture where you had to remember everything, and he thought that having to memorise things meant you understood them better. Writing things down, he thought,would actually mean writing them down and forgetting them.

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  1. shinichi Post author

    We were never meant to read

    William Leith reviews Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain by Maryanne Wolf

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/books/non_fictionreviews/3672055/We-were-never-meant-to-read.html

    If I tell you that this book is about reading, that doesn’t sound very interesting, does it? It conjures up the impression of somebody sitting on a chair, holding a book or newspaper, not appearing to do very much.

    But this book is, at least in parts, blindingly fascinating. Its point is that, when you sit on a chair and pick up a book, a huge amount of stuff is happening.

    And that stuff, says Maryanne Wolf, who has made the study of reading her life’s work, is some of the most important stuff you can imagine.

    Reading, says Wolf, changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you fit the words together into sentences.

    This takes an amazing amount of ultra-fast processing. Brains that do this are different from brains that don’t.
    One important thing to bear in mind is that our brains did not evolve to read. They evolved to hunt and gather, make campfires and so on. This means that reading is an act of improvisation – when you read, you’re actually using parts of the brain that were designed to do other things. You are, as it were, patching together several different technologies.

    That’s why lots of people can’t read very well – until very recently in human history, the ability to read written language was not adaptive; it conferred no advantages. But 50,000 years ago, on the savannah or the steppes, the dyslexic brain might well have given its possessor an edge.

    When people started to read and write, it was not seen universally as a good thing. On the contrary, some people, including Socrates, thought it might be terribly damaging, in the same way that many people today see computer games and text messages as damaging.

    Socrates came from a culture where you had to remember everything, and he thought that having to memorise things meant you understood them better. Writing things down, he thought,would actually mean writing them down and forgetting them.

    Of course, in some ways he was right. But being able to forget things, and refer to them when you wanted to, turned out to be hugely empowering. Forgetting things frees up space in your mind for other things. When you don’t have to remember everything, you can calculate and theorise in new ways.

    Plato, Socrates’ pupil, thought written language might be a good thing; Aristotle, Plato’s pupil, was sure it was. When written language enters a culture, there’s no turning back.

    But is it a good thing? In his famous book Understanding Media, Marshall McLuhan pointed out that the creation of an alphabet changed the world, not necessarily in a good way.

    For one thing, it separates a human being from the thing he or she is thinking about. It takes power away from priests and gives it to merchants and warriors, because alphabets are more democratic. Soldiers can read instructions written in alphabetic language; they struggled with hieroglyphs and pictograms, which take years or even decades to master.

    What McLuhan said was that ‘phonetic culture endows men with the means of repressing their feelings and emotions when engaged in action.’

    This book explains, in a very detailed and scholarly manner, how this process works. Wolf, who is Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, tells us a great deal about how the brain processes information.

    There’s a lot about neurological timing – how information zings around the brain in milliseconds. There’s a fascinating section on dyslexia. Nobody knows everything about how it works, but it seems to have a lot to do with timing. If you process information a few milliseconds more slowly than a good reader, you experience a sort of neurological traffic-jam in the left side of your brain.

    So you recruit the more creative, more spatially aware right brain to do some of the left brain’s work. In the Stone Age, this might have helped some people – they might have grasped rudimentary architecture better than their peers. These days, of course, it holds them back.

    There’s a lot of difficult material in here. But it’s worth the effort. I kept wanting to read more about how written language changed history, and more about the invention of the alphabet. This is a tribute to Wolf, who could not possibly cram everything in here. For people interested in language, this is a must. You’ll find yourself focusing on words in new ways. Read it slowly – it will take time to sink in.

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