Proust and the Squid

Reading is a complicated business. Certainly, choosing what goes into your reading diet has profound implications on what you’ll be thinking and the type of person you are becoming – as evidenced in the scary media polarization these days. But the act of reading itself is more complicated than meets the eye. In more ways than one. Eye connects to brain, and somehow squiggly patterns become rich in meaning. This is the story of Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf.

 

The book is subtitled “the story and science of the reading brain”. Part philosophy, part neuroscience, part child development, part history, Wolf lays out a fascinating narrative with hieroglyphics and early alphabets, gobs of neuroscience research, reading education programs, and a very close look at dyslexia. Reading is indeed a complicated business. Many of us take it for granted. At some magic moment, we were able to read, forgetting how difficult it was to begin with, and being unaware of the many factors that contributed to this newfound ability that opened up new worlds to us.

 

Our brains are not wired for reading. And for much of the history of homo sapiens, most folks didn’t read. Even today, in many parts of the world, reading is a luxury – books are scarce, and in oral cultures one’s native language may not have a written version. Yet somehow, some time ago, some folks, be it the Egyptians or Akkadians, started representing large parts of their vocabulary by creating symbols. Why? Was it because there was too much to hold in the mind? For me, blogging is a way to offload my thoughts, giving me the opportunity to sift them again at leisure (with internal links, tags, or search); it’s a sort of Pensieve or diary, I suppose. The ancient philosopher Socrates railed against the written word. But thanks to his star pupil Plato, we have his dialogues on record.

 

Wolf’s forte is child development, and she provides some marvelous narrative in support of reading some of my favorite fiction: “For young readers who are moving from simply mastering content to discovering what lies beneath the surface of a text, the literature of fantasy and magic is ideal. Think of the many images that Tolkien uses in Lord of the Rings to portray good and evil. The worlds of Middle Earth, Narnia, and Hogwarts provide fertile ground for developing skills of metaphor, inference, and analogy, because nothing is ever as it seems in these places. To figure out how to elude ring-wraiths and dragons, and how to do what I right, calls on all of one’s wits.”

 

At age twelve I received The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings as a gift from a family friend, and I read it over and over again to glean all its finer details. The educator in me perks up as Wolf makes strong ties to the learning process: “Comprehension processes grow impressively… where children learn to connect prior knowledge, predict dire or good consequences, draw inferences from every danger-filled corner, monitor gaps in their understanding, and interpret how each new clue, revelation, or added piece of knowledge changes what they know. To practice these skills, they learn to unpeel the layers of meaning in a word, a phrase, or a thought. That is, in this long phase of reading development, they leave the surface layers of text to explore the wondrous terrain that lies beneath it.”

 

If only I could say the same about learning chemistry. My first two years of high school chemistry were a complete blur, as in… I was a complete blur. I don’t think I had bad teachers, but I’m not sure I understood any of the principles, although I was somehow able to make it through national exams by employing pattern recognition and practicing lots of past-year papers. It was not until college that I started to appreciate the “wondrous terrain” of chemistry, looking beneath the surface and relishing the marvels of orbitals, symmetry, and the schizophrenic behavior of chemical bonds.

 

Perhaps some of my students have a similar blurry experience in my chemistry courses. Wolf’s detailed account of the complexity of merging the visual system with other parts of the brain related to memory, comprehension, and thinking, made me ponder further inherent challenges in learning chemistry. I’ve known about Johnstone’s Triangle for a while, and have wondered whether the symbolic nature of chemistry brings additional challenges to the learning-recognition-brain nexus. Wolf’s comprehensive explanation of the many types of dyslexia and how it incorporates different neural pathways gives me pause as I recall some office hour conversations where something so clear to me still seemed so unclear to the student. It’s like the neural pathways didn’t click. Perhaps there exists an equivalent chemistry-dyslexia that might be equally if not more prevalent.

 

You can’t learn chemistry with text alone. Pictures are crucial! As a chemist, the line structure tells me a lot about the properties and potential chemical reactivity of, say, the caffeine molecule. And like cognitive psychology’s proverbial expert chess player, I can probably recall its structure exactly after just a glance. (Since I study the origin of life, I know the structure of the closely related guanine and xanthine.) The text shorthand is a bear. In SMILES notation, caffeine would be rendered as: “CN1C=NC2=C1C(=O)N(C(=O)N2C)C”. Good luck visualizing that. Although encoding the information digitally in a SMILES string makes it quick and compact to reproduce in different ways.

 

It makes me wonder: Could you do the opposite? Teach chemistry just with pictures and figures, some oral language support, and just ditch the text of the textbooks? Is all that reading and writing necessary? Is it so that we teachers can easily read, write, and grade exams? Because we don’t have the time and energy to give each individual student an oral exam? Hmmm… I don’t know. What would Socrates think? If we plopped him in the twenty-first century world of video?

 

I don’t know, and my brain feels full of swirling thoughts that I cannot grasp. Perhaps that’s what the written word allows us to do: Take the time to think. By reading, pausing, writing, pausing, thinking, pausing, I can piece together complex arguments and tie together seemingly loose threads of information. I have to go slowly at first. New learning builds on prior learning. New discoveries build on prior discoveries – the story of science, and perhaps any other field of study. But as I progress I will build fluency. I’m not as eloquent as Wolf so I’ll leave you her words to ponder about being on the threshold of becoming an expert reader.

 

“The fluent, comprehending reader’s brain is on the threshold of attaining the single most essential gift of the evolved reading brain: time. With its decoding processes almost automatic, the young fluent brain learns to integrate more metaphorical, inferential, analogical, affective background and experimental knowledge with every newly won millisecond. For the first time in reading development, the brain becomes fast enough to think and feel differently. This gift of time is the physiological basis for our capacity to think ‘endless thoughts most wonderful.’ Nothing is more important than the act of reading.”