Proust and the Squid and the Matrix

How often will I get to write a title like that without being drunk? Yay! Explanation of image in last paragraph.

We've been discussing this topic from various angles when considering the recent and disouraging NEA survey on reading and in considering e-readers and the different ways we interact with them versus a book. How about versus video?

Well, in the yet-unsettled debate of the developmental value of television as educational medium and of fluent reading as a distinct and superior cognitive
activity, there's a newly assembled set of interesting arguments. Caleb Crain's whole New Yorker article is worthwhile, including highlights of the important differences in cognition between readers and illiterates who really do perceive and process the world around them very differently. (via Arts & Letters Daily) There's also juicy stuff on how much TV (even educational) for kids seems to be the magic amount before the onset of underperformance in grade-level reading, science, and math. Here are some snipped chunks I found interesting:

...Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all. “The act of reading is not natural,” Maryanne Wolf writes in “Proust and the Squid” (Harper; $25.95), an account of the history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do it only because the brain’s plasticity enables the repurposing of circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks—distinguishing at a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say...

...Drawing on recent imaging studies, she [Wolf] explains in detail how a modern child’s brain wires itself for literacy. The ground is laid in preschool, when parents read to a child, talk with her, and encourage awareness of sound elements like rhyme and alliteration, perhaps with “Mother Goose” poems. Scans show that when a child first starts to read she has to use more of her brain than adults do. Broad regions light up in both hemispheres. As a child’s neurons specialize in recognizing letters and become more efficient, the regions activated become smaller.

At some point, as a child progresses from decoding to fluent reading, the route of signals through her brain shifts...reading starts to move along a faster and more efficient “ventral route,”... With the gain in time and the freed-up brainpower, Wolf suggests, a fluent reader is able to integrate more of her own thoughts and feelings into her experience. “The secret at the heart of reading,” Wolf writes, is “the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those that came before.”

...When reading goes well, Wolf suggests, it feels effortless, like drifting down a river rather than rowing up it. It makes you smarter because it leaves more of your brain alone. Ruskin once compared reading to a conversation with the wise and noble, and Proust corrected him. It’s much better than that, Proust wrote. To read is “to receive a communication with another way of thinking, all the while remaining alone, that is, while continuing to enjoy the intellectual power that one has in solitude and that conversation dissipates immediately."

This seems, to me, like an erudite explanation of what avid readers, even writers, struggle to explain to the unconvinced: the rich and exciting fountain of thoughts and feelings which is possible while reading because the translation of squiggles into meaning has become fluid and automatic.

If you haven't seen The Matrix, the movie takes place in a dystopian future where humans live unaware that they're enslaved within a machine-made simulation of what was once normal life. The few humans outside this shared delusion often view the simulation (people, buildings, weather, everything) not as images and sound, but instead choose to monitor it as lines of computer code cascading down their screens. (screen capture image above) As it turns out, this story detail is expressing a real truth about human cognition. Once we've learned to effortlessly decode, we can perceive more completely, faster, and with better retention from reading than experiencing real-time images and sound. The good news: The Matrix takes place centuries in the future. The machines have become implacable overlords using humanity as wet-cell batteries, but people are still reading. Whew!