Proust and the Squid?
March 9th 2008 21:36
Signature Tune
It sounds like something from Alice in Wonderland, doesn't it?
But , it isn't, it's about reading and the nervous system,
So what have they got to do with each other?
A book in praise of reading verges on tautology. Nobody likely to read Proust and the Squid will need to be told that reading generates thought, or that it gives a feeling of inner selfhood. Maryanne Wolf puts Proust into her book because she likes his account of reading’s pleasures. But any reader will know them already without Proust’s help. The squid part of her book is more interesting. Scientists in the 1950s used the squid’s nervous system to discover how neurons transmit to each other, and this leads Wolf to an account of how today’s cognitive neuroscientists are finding out what happens inside a human brain when it learns to read.
Put simply (not always Wolf’s strong suit), before a brain can read it must physically rearrange itself. It must create new neuronal circuits to connect the part it uses for seeing with the part it uses for listening to someone talk. Not until it does this will the brain’s owner realise that marks on paper represent sounds. Some brains never manage it, or do so only imperfectly. Their owners used to be dismissed as stupid. But we now know some of them are highly gifted. Among famous dyslexics Wolf lists Leonardo da Vinci, Einstein, Picasso, Edison and Alexander Graham Bell. Why did these exceptional beings fail to master a skill ordinary mortals easily acquire?
To set the scene for answering that question Wolf takes us through a brief history of written languages, starting with Sumerian cuneiform in about 3000BC. Broadly speaking, the development over time was from languages that represented things by pictures, as in Egyptian hieroglyphics, to languages where written symbols stood for syllables in the spoken language. Then came the great breakthrough when the Greeks invented the alphabet, in which a limited number of letters can convey all the language’s basic sounds. That is presumably when dyslexia started, because dyslexics could not match up the letters and the sounds. On the plus side, many linguists believe that the invention of the alphabet greatly increased the human brain’s capacity for new thought and abstract ideas. It was this single invention, they argue, that made possible the flowering of Greek drama, science, art and philosophy which gave birth to western culture.
But if an alphabet is so important, is it the case that humans who do not have an alphabet think differently from those who do? Does an alphabet build a different brain? It is not a trivial question, because one of the world’s main languages, Chinese, does not have an alphabet. Further, neuroscience can now demonstrate that not having an alphabet does indeed cause the brain to organise itself differently. Brain scans show that when someone reads an alphabetical language, such as English, specialised parts of the brain’s left hemisphere are activated. But when a Chinese speaker reads Chinese, quite different parts of the brain are used. They are in both hemispheres, and include frontal areas not used for reading by English readers. Since this proves that the Chinese reader’s brain is connected up differently, it prompts the question whether Chinese thought is different from western thought. Linguists used to argue that there is always a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. This idea fell out of favour under the influence of Chomskyan linguistics and theories of universal grammar. But the advent of the brain scan seems to be reopening the question. What Wolf’s own views are it is impossible to say. Having presented the brain-scan evidence, she refrains from speculating about how the Chinese think. No doubt her failure to grasp this hot potato is a mark of prudence. All the same, it is a bit of a let-down for readers who have followed her excitedly through a couple of hundred pages.
Reviewed by John Carey
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