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BRAIN SCIENCE PODCAST

W i t h G i n g e r C a m p b e l l , M D

Episode #24

Reading and the Brain, A Discussion of the Maryanne Wolf’s Book,

Proust and the Squid

Aired November 16, 2007

[music]

INTRODUCTION

This is the Brain Science Podcast – the podcast for everyone who has a brain –

and I’m your host, Dr. Ginger Campbell. On the Brain Science Podcast we

explore how recent discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the mysteries of

how our brains make us who we are. For more information including Show

Notes, links to previous episodes, and information about how to subscribe, please

go to the website brainsciencepodcast.com. We also have a Discussion Forum at

brainscienceforum.com, and you can send me email at [email protected].

[music]

DISCUSSION

Welcome back to Brain Science Podcast. This is Episode 24. Today we’re going

to talk about reading and the brain. If you are new to the Brain Science Podcast I

just want to mention something about how the podcast is organized. There are

basically two kinds of episodes: Episodes in which I discuss a book or a topic

inspired by a book, and episodes in which I interview a scientist or a book author.

I try to alternate between episodes that are discussions and episodes that are

Copyright Virginia Campbell, MD 2007

http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com

http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com

http://www.brainscienceforum.com

http://www.brainscienceforum.com

mailto:[email protected]


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interviews because I know that some people prefer one type over the other.

Today’s episode is going to be a book discussion.

[music]

Language is one of the most complicated and controversial areas of brain

research, but it is generally agreed that even if language is not hard-wired, our

brains do come with some predisposition for the acquisition of language.

Language is found in every human culture, but reading and writing is a relatively

recent event. Most people do learn how to talk, but many people in the world

never learn how to read.

Today we’re going to explore some of the things that make reading special. The

inspiration for today’s episode is the book, Proust and the Squid: The Story and

Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. This was published in 2007.

This book explores the history of reading and what we know about how the brain

changes when we learn to read. It also talks about what goes wrong when

children can’t read; but my emphasis is going to be on what happens in the brains

of normal readers.

The author, Dr. Maryanne Wolf, is a professor of child development at Tufts

University, where she is also the director of the Center for Reading and Language

Research. Wolf is one of the leading researchers in the field of dyslexia, and she

brings her passion for reading to her efforts to help children with problems like

dyslexia learn how to read. In the book’s preface Wolf invites us to consider, “The

brain’s nearly miraculous capacity to rearrange itself to learn to read, and in the

process to form new thoughts.”

She reminds us that reading is not natural. Since reading was invented only a few

thousand years ago it’s fair to say, as Wolf does, that we were never born to read.

She considers it to be one of the single most remarkable inventions in human


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history. Learning to read taps our brain’s ability to make new connections. It

relies on the brain’s plasticity.

In this book Wolf sets out to tell the story of how humans learned to read. She

divides the topic into three parts: The early history of how our species learned to

read; the developmental story of how individuals learn to read; and what happens

when the brain can’t learn to read. I’m going to focus on the first two parts of the

book.

Besides emphasizing the role of neuroplasticity in learning how to read, Wolf also

explores how reading changes us as people and the implications of moving to

what many people think will be a post-literate society. I’ll talk more about that at

the end of the podcast. Wolf quotes author Joseph Epstein as saying, “We are

what we read,” which makes her wonder what are the implications of moving

away from reading books to skimming the Internet.

The title of her book, Proust and the Squid, is intended to demonstrate

complementary ways of understanding the reading process. ‘Proust’ represents

the deep changes in our consciousness that can result from reading. Consider

how your favorite book is different every time you read it. Reading is a creative

process because we bring what she calls ‘our entire store of meaning’ to whatever

we read.

It’s important to remember there’s absolutely no genetic programming for

reading. Each person learns how to read from scratch. Of course we do probably

adapt innate capacities like pattern recognition in order to be able to learn to

read.

The ‘squid’ of the book’s title is an interesting choice, because the squid has been

a subject of neuroscience research for many years. And it has been shown that if

a squid is not wired up correctly it can’t swim properly. And so, for her the squid


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represents the part of the book that is exploring the questions about what is

different in the brains of children who can’t learn how to read.

In considering the history of how reading came about, one of the questions that

we would like to be able to answer is the question of how the brain adapted itself

to read. To me the most interesting thing about considering the earliest systems

of writing is considering how each system required different adaptations by our

brains; or as she says, “Reading never just happens.” Wolf says on page 25, “The

story of reading offers a unique documentation of how each new writing system

contributed something special to our species’ intellectual development.”

What kind of discoveries were necessary in order for writing to evolve? Well, we

have objects that have markings on them that have been dated back to around

77,000 years ago. But writing is thought to have developed only in the last

10,000 years. She singles out three key discoveries. One is the idea of symbolic

representation—the discovery that marks on a piece of clay or stone could

represent something concrete in the natural world or something abstract like a

number.

Second would be the insight that the symbols could be used to communicate

through time and space. And finally—most importantly—the idea of sound-

symbol correspondence, which means the realization that all words are composed

of individual sounds, and that these sounds could be represented by symbols.

And this step is the step that did not occur everywhere.

So, I’m going to talk a little bit about the history of writing. We don’t know for

sure which written language came first. But we are more interested in exploring

what kind of cerebral adaptations and change occurred than figuring out which

came first. According to the current evidence it appears that the first steps

occurred between about 8000 and 4000 BCE. This was from when they found


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the tokens, and those are associated with the cave drawings that have been found

in France and Spain.

Brain imaging of modern people shows that if we are looking at meaningful lines

it causes about two to three times as much brain activity compared to looking at

lines that have no meaning. If a token has meaning it is thought that then the

brain has to connect the basic visual areas to both language systems and

conceptual systems in the temporal and parietal lobes, and also back to the visual

and auditory association areas. So, the key idea here is increasing connections

between several different parts of the cerebral cortex.

A key area is called the angular gyrus because it’s located at the juncture between

the three posterior lobes—the temporal, parietal, and occipital lobes. The angular

gyrus is the area that the great neurobiologist Norman Geschwind called the

association area of association areas. Imaging research at MIT and UCLA has

shown that pathways to and from the angular gyrus become intensely activated

during reading development.

[music]

The next step in writing development occurred around 3300 to 3200 BCE with

cuneiform and hieroglyphics. Now, for the purposes of our discussion it doesn’t

matter whether the Sumerian cuneiform writing or the Egyptian hieroglyphics

came first. I’m going to talk about the cuneiform first. The first Sumerian

writing was not very abstract. It was mostly pictographic. But it became more

sophisticated rather suddenly; at least in terms of the record that we have.

It became more logographic and abstract. Logographic means that the writing

system directly conveys the concepts of the oral language instead of the sounds of

the words. Importantly, over time some of the symbols began to represent oral

Sumerian. When this happens it’s known as what the linguists call logosyllabary.


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And the key idea here is that this system would put more demands on the brain,

including now the beginnings of frontal lobe development.

Brain imaging shows that the brain reacts differently to a pseudoword—such as a

collection of letters like ‘mbli’—and a real word like ‘limb.’ If you look at

something like the letters ‘mbli’—which is not a real word in English—it only

activates the visual association areas. If you’re looking at a real word like ‘limb’—

which is the same letters but in a different order that now have meaning—it lights

up almost half the cortex.

One thing that’s interesting to consider is that Chinese has a similar history of

moving from pictographic symbols to logographic symbols, so it essentially

represents a living example of a logosyllabary writing system. And we do have

access to brain images from Chinese readers. Their scans show a lot more

involvement of the right hemisphere than those of an English reader.

Logographic systems like Chinese and cuneiform seem to involve distinct parts of

the frontal and temporal areas—particular areas involved in what are known as

motoric memory skills. The way that Chinese symbols are learned is that the

person has to write them over and over again; so that’s what’s meant by motoric

memory skills. So, the Chinese brains give us a glimpse of what the Sumerian

reading brains might have been like.

We also know a little bit about how the Sumerian children learned to read

because we have clay tablets that contain lists of words. And it’s clear from

looking at the tablets that one side is where the teacher wrote and the other side

is where the student copied. And from what they wrote—kind of a form of early

journaling—we know that it took years of practice to learn to write in this system.

Wolf mentions that some of the principles that they used could be relevant today,

especially the realization that teaching of reading must begin with explicit


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attention to the characteristics of the oral language. Another interesting point

about the Sumerians was the fact that in the royal houses the women and the

men both learned how to read.

The Sumerian language disappeared around 1600 BCE, but the Akkadian writing

system incorporated many of its written symbols and methods, so it didn’t really

disappear completely until around 600 BCE. Akkadian was the lingua franca—or

main language—in the Middle East from about the third to the first centuries

BCE. Some examples of things that were written in Akkadian that you might

have heard of include the Epic of Gilgamesh and the Code of Hammurabi.

What about hieroglyphics? Current evidence seems to indicate that the Egyptian

hieroglyphics were invented independently around 3100 BCE. It might have even

been as early as 3400 BCE. The hieroglyphics underwent two important

transformations. One was that it evolved into two cursive forms of writing. The

other most important thing was the fact that the Egyptians discovered the

equivalent of a phoneme. Phonemes are the smallest sound components of

words. Early on Egyptian writing began to incorporate a tiny subset of characters

that represented the consonants in oral Egyptian.

In terms of modern day languages Japanese is somewhat similar in that it has

two writing systems. There is the older Chinese-based logographic system which

is called kanji, and then the later syllabary system which is called kana. Like the

Egyptian partial alphabet, kana was designed to supplement kanji so that they

could record new words, foreign words, and names. The key idea here is that in

the hieroglyphics we see the birth of a partial alphabet, but it was never fully

exploited and it never became a true alphabet.

[music]


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So, the evidence seems to indicate that writing was invented at least three times

in the last part of the fourth millennium BCE, and also at least three more times

in later periods. The first of the three systems that we know about from later

periods is the writing system on the island of Crete in the second millennium

BCE. This included a pictographic Linear A and another system called Linear B.

Then in the New World the Mayans used a system that was a logosyllabary

system that’s thought to have been created by another people called the Zapotecs.

I don’t know anything about the Zapotecs. I know that the Mayan code was very

difficult to decipher. And then the third writing system that came up around this

time was ancient Chinese. And Chinese is the only ancient system still in use, so

it gives us some surprising insights into the past.

So, to summarize what we learned from the history of writing up until this point,

the key things to remember about the ancient writing systems are they seem to

have arisen independently, and each system seems to have tapped into our

brain’s plasticity to enable new connections between different parts of the brain.

Finally, modern Chinese readers provide a window into what some of these brain

changes might have been.

[music]

The next step in the history has to do with the birth of the alphabet. We’re going

to explore why the appearance of the alphabet was so important. Now, there is

some evidence that there was a language called Ugaret that might have had the

first true functioning alphabet. But rather than debate that, we’re really looking

at the question of what the alphabet would mean to the brain. Wolf proposes two

questions. 1. What makes an alphabet and what separates it from the vestiges of

the previous syllabary or logosyllabary systems? And, 2. Are there significant

intellectual resources unique to the alphabet-reading brain?


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Remember that we said there were three discoveries that needed to be made in

order for writing to evolve, and the third one was having a correspondence

between symbols and the sounds in a language. In fact she says that the third

cognitive breakthrough in the history of writing was developing a system that

requires only a limited number of signs to represent all the sounds in a language.

That would be an alphabet. It’s usually assumed that this allows for cognitive

efficiency; that is, it will be relying on the ability of the brain’s specialized regions

to reach speeds that are almost automatic. And we’ll come back to why this

automaticity is important later.

So, the first question was what makes an alphabet. The classicist, Eric Havelock,

defined three criteria. He said that it had to have a limited number of letters or

characters—optimally between 20 and 30—a comprehensive set of characters

capable of conveying the minimal sound units of the language, and a complete

correspondence between each phoneme in the language and the visual sign or

letters. Based on these criteria the Greek alphabet, which is usually dated to

around 750 BCE, is considered to be the first to satisfy all these conditions. Now,

not all scholars agree with this conclusion. But, again, that’s not the argument we

care about here.

I mentioned one of the earlier languages of the other type was Cretan Linear B.

This was one that scholars spent years trying to decipher until they finally figured

out that it was actually a very crude rendition of the spoken Greek of the time,

which was around about the 15th century BCE. Now, this period is important

because it was a time of a very highly developed oral culture in ancient Greece—

the culture which Homer, who is usually ascribed to the 8th century BCE, was

describing in The Iliad and The Odyssey. We now know that Homer actually was

describing the time of about the 15th century BCE; but before the city of Knossos

was discovered on Crete in 1900 it was always assumed that Homer’s

descriptions were completely based on myth.


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The Greek historian Thucidites says that an educated Greek citizen had to

memorize large portions from Homer. Of course, it was in the form of an epic

poem, which aided in memorization. However, there’s not really any reason to

think that there was a significant difference between us and the ancient Greeks in

terms of the structures of the brain involved in memory. So, we might wonder

how did they do it. I sort of suspect it comes down to motivation, because the

Greeks placed a great value on oral culture and memory. The evidence seems to

indicate that the first Greek alphabet came into existence largely because the

Greeks wanted to preserve the oral tradition of Homer.

And if you’ve ever done anything with memorization you know it’s kind of a

matter of habit. I found myself as I was reading this, wondering about the fact

that I know when I was a kid I memorized the multiplication tables, and they’re

still pretty well etched into my brain. And I found myself thinking about kids

today who have come along after the invention of calculators, and I wonder

whether or not they actually ever memorized the multiplication tables.

The next question is does the alphabet build a different brain? Everyone seems

to agree that the alphabet is a really big deal—maybe even the apex of all writing.

But there are several different claims made about why it’s so important, or how it

works on the brain. We’re going to consider three claims that have been made

about the alphabet. One is that it has an increased efficiency over other systems,

two is the idea that it facilitates novel thought, and three, the claim that the

alphabet facilitates reading acquisition through enhanced awareness of speech.

The first claim is that the alphabet is more efficient than other reading systems.

The fluency of Chinese readers is an obvious objection to this claim. If we

compare Chinese readers to alphabet readers it seems that different kinds of

adaptations can lead to efficiency. Brain scans show that alphabet readers rely

more on the posterior left hemisphere, while Chinese readers recruit more areas

for specialized automatic processes in both hemispheres. That is, they seem to


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use more of their brains. There’s actually a case that was described back in the

1930’s of a bilingual patient who suffered a stroke of the posterior brain, and he

lost the ability to read Chinese but he could still read English.

And then we can consider that Japanese readers actually learn two different

systems. They have the efficient syllabary, kana, for foreign words and names,

and the Chinese-influenced logographic kanji. When they read kanji—this is

according to brain scans—they use the same parts of the brain as Chinese readers.

But when they read kana their brains look like alphabet readers. This seems to

tell us that it’s not a question of either/or. Instead the brain can use different

pathways for reading different kinds of script. Wolf says claims about efficiency

have to be viewed as a continuum rather than as something unique to alphabets.

Cognitive scientists at the University of Pittsburgh have found that there are

three regions of the brain that are used across all writing systems. There’s an

area in the occipital temporal region that is an area for visual specialization;

there’s a frontal area near Broca’s area that’s involved in the recognition of

phonemes and the meanings of words; and the upper temporal lobes and lower

adjacent parietal lobe areas seem to correspond to an area where there are

multiple elements being processed, including sound and meaning.

There is a good diagram on page 64 in the book that compares the brains of the

English, Chinese, and Japanese readers, and shows how these different areas are

activated. Someone might want to call the parts that they have in common the

universal reading system, but the real idea is that learning any language is going

to rearrange our brain and will use multiple pathways. The conclusion she

reaches is that alphabets build different brains, but they aren’t necessarily better

brains. Japanese and Cherokee are examples of language which are syllabary, not

alphabet-based, that are just as efficient as an alphabet.


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The second claim was that the alphabet stimulates novel thought better. Well, it

seems more likely that it’s actually the act of writing, rather than the alphabet,

that stimulates novel thought. Consider your own personal experience. If you’ve

ever done any kind of writing—especially journalling—you know that it’s when

you sit down to write that you will come up with ideas that you wouldn’t have

otherwise. And this can be very surprising if you’re new to it. One famous writer

—and I don’t remember which writer it was—was once quoted as saying that he

didn’t know what he thought until he wrote.

Even so, it’s probably true that the alphabet makes it easier to learn how to read

and write, and that this makes it possible for us to begin to have novel and

independent thought earlier in our reading life. Wolf calls this the beginning of

the democratization of the young reading brain. One of the most profound and

prolific periods of creativity did accompany the spread of the Greek alphabet.

The third claim regarding the importance of the alphabet was that the alphabet

facilitates reading acquisition through enhanced awareness of speech. The

Greeks are credited with discovering that the entire stream of an oral language

could be analyzed and systematically segmented into individual sounds—what we

call phonemes now. Modern equipment makes it possible to really look into the

acoustics of speech and realize how complex these sounds are. And for one thing,

we know now that when people are speaking in their native language they don’t

even pause between words. So, it’s really a pretty amazing accomplishment by

the Greeks.

Another thing is that the Greek pupils were given an almost perfect alphabet with

almost perfect rules between their letters and how they were pronounced, which

is certainly not true for English. So, we can’t prove that the early fluency of

Greeks resulted in the expansion of thought that led to the great classical Greek

period. But it’s still an interesting idea. It’s ironic that for centuries the Greeks


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were ambivalent about teaching their alphabet because they regarded their oral

culture as superior.

This brings me to what I think might be the most surprising thing I learned from

reading Proust and the Squid; and that is that Socrates was opposed to literacy.

Now, if you’ve read anything about the history of Western philosophy you know

that Socrates never wrote anything. Everything we know about him comes from

the writings of Plato. But before I read this book I didn’t know that Socrates

actually opposed literacy. Socrates bemoaned the spread of literacy. He thought

that it was going to make his students lazy and, ironically, he thought that it was

going to diminish their ability to think for themselves.

Wolf considers his objections. He thought that the written word was too

inflexible. Today when we think about the effort required to capture ideas with

precise written language, we know that this leads to an important inner dialogue.

But possibly it can be argued that writing was just too young in his day for him to

appreciate that aspect.

An obvious objection of Socrates was that the written language was going to

destroy memory. Now, we don’t know whether our brain’s pathways connecting

language and long-term memory are any different from those of the ancient

Greek. But we could ask what is the significance of the fact that memorization is

continuing to disappear, and does this have any significance for our brains.

He also feared the loss of control over language. He thought that it was

dangerous for knowledge to be accessible without the guidance of a teacher,

because he saw knowledge and wisdom as being two different things. This

probably resonates with people today, because you hear similar concerns

expressed about the increasing use of the Internet to get ideas and knowledge. I

think that Wolf is right when she says that it’s valuable to consider Socrates’

objections when we think about the possibility that the role of reading may be


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diminishing in our society. That is, can his objections be applied to the move

away from reading to the use of the Internet?

So, before we move on from history, we see that there were several steps in the

history of writing that seemed to have culminated with the invention of the

alphabet. And all of these steps involved tapping into the plasticity of our brains.

[music]

Now we’re going to talk about what happens in the individual brain as it learns

how to read. The first point that she makes is that learning to read starts sooner

than you might think. She says—and this is, I think, a pretty well established fact

—that babies who are read to when they are small are more likely to be readers

when they grow up. In fact, Wolf argues that as soon as an infant can sit in a

caregiver’s lap he can learn to associate the act of reading with being loved. She

says associating hearing written language and being loved provides the best

possible foundation for the long process of learning how to read. She is an

advocate of reading to babies as soon as possible. But, as you will see, it’s not

because she thinks that we should be teaching them to read sooner.

The next key to learning how to read is early language development. So, before

you can learn how to read you have to learn your language. Picture books help

children learn how to recognize that things like horses and dogs have names—in

other words, to develop skills in object recognition. Part of this process is

connecting up the different cognitive systems like vision and hearing.

The key is that at this age being read to helps the child’s basic language skills. For

example, being read to helps us to learn that sentence order makes a difference.

Also, it helps children to learn how to hear the phonemes—the smallest pieces of

sound in words. And it turns out that understanding that words are made of

sounds may be the most critical component.


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When children listen to stories they can start to learn about emotions and they

can start to learn about people that are different from them. They can also start

to learn to see things from the perspective of others which, as she mentions, is a

very important cognitive skill, not a moral development. Exposure to books helps

to expand the child’s vocabulary, so that the typical middle class child has been

exposed to 10,000 words by age five. We also get exposed to grammar and

syntax, and this is really important if you’re growing up in a family that uses a

different language or a different dialect.

Another skill that children can begin to develop even while they’re being read to,

is to begin to understand analogies and metaphors. She mentions the example of

the well-known series of children’s books, Curious George. She gives the

example of when Curious George rides up in a balloon and the book describes

that the houses looked like toy houses and the people like dolls. And then there

are even higher levels of understanding that begin to develop from listening to

stories being read to you, such as the fact that even a preschool child knows that

if a story starts with, ‘Once, long ago,’ a fairy tale is coming. So, they learn how to

predict based on patterns.

So, being read to is the first step in learning how to read. Now, the next step is

learning the letters of the alphabet. Not surprisingly, it is thought that this taps

into our innate ability of pattern recognition. We don’t have any brain images of

children learning the letters, but we do know that if we image an adult brain,

object naming and letter naming light up the same area. We would expect that

probably if we looked at a brain of a preliterate child it would be using the same

part of the brain for object naming. In fact, in this view, object naming and letter

naming would be the first two chapters in the rearranging of our brain into a

literate brain.

Wolf’s research shows that both the ability to name objects and the ability to

name letters are predictors of how well children will learn how to read later. This


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is interesting, because it seems like parents—especially mothers—have an almost

innate instinct for getting their kids to do this. I don’t have any children, but I’ve

always noticed that parents of small children are always encouraging them to

name everything around them. So, we sort of instinctively know how to begin

this in our children.

But there is a reason why children don’t actually learn how to read usually before

the age of four or five. For one thing, learning how to read requires that the brain

integrate various sources of information—auditory, visual, linguistic, and

conceptual. That means a lot of connections between different brain parts, and

these areas aren’t fully myelinated until age five, or even later in most people.

And they tend to myelinate later in boys. The myelination is the insulation that

forms around the axons, or the connections between neurons. It’s important for

speed and accuracy of conduction between neurons.

So, the key idea here is that efforts to teach children to read earlier don’t really

make any sense biologically. And it doesn’t take much imagination to see why

they are potentially counterproductive. So, instead of trying to get your kids to

read sooner it’s better to just concentrate on helping them learn language. Read

to them as much as possible. The more language and written language they are

exposed to, the better they are going to do later when it actually becomes time to

learn how to read.

She talks about two elements to the stages that happen before you learn how to

read, that you might not realize are important. And these are the role of writing

and the role of poetry. One of the things that she talks about in the book—and

she goes into some detail about this—is the fact that scribbling really isn’t a waste

of time. Even if what the child writes can’t be read, the attempts to write as the

child is leading up to learning how to read are valuable. So, we should go ahead

and encourage our children to write, even if they aren’t really writing what we

want yet.


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Secondly the role of poetry is more important than you might think, because it

helps the child to be able to become aware of small sound differences. Think

about rhyming—that’s really about recognizing the similarity in sounds. Poetry

and reading nursery rhymes are helping them with that phoneme recognition

part.

Before we can learn how to read we have to understand three key things. We

have to understand that the printed words represent spoken words, we have to

understand that spoken words are made up of sounds, and we have to

understand that the letters convey the sounds. And it’s this correspondence

between the letters and the spoken words that is difficult for some children to

make the leap of. Again, it’s been shown that being able to recognize the smallest

sounds in words—phonemes—is a very important part of learning how to read,

and that children that have reading problems often have difficulty with

recognizing these phonemes.

On a previous episode I mentioned a program for dyslexia called Fast Forward.

It’s based on the idea of taking the phonemes and stretching them out in time so

the child can learn how to recognize them, and then gradually shortening them

back to their normal length. And this has been found to be very effective, and

also demonstrates again the importance of the phoneme recognition.

One of the studies that Wolf describes in her book is a study that was done with

preschool children in England. They had four groups and they did different

things. But one of the groups was taught some kind of simple rhyming training.

And what they found was not only did they have better phoneme awareness, but

they also learned how to read more easily. So, let’s hear it for Mother Goose and

Dr. Seuss.

Modern approaches to teaching reading emphasize the development of phoneme

awareness. I certainly know this was not part of teaching reading when I was a


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child. They are trying to develop simple tools that will help children learn these

three key concepts: the one-to-one correspondence between a sound and a

symbol; the fact that each letter has a name but can represent a sound or sounds,

but also that the sound can be represented by a letter or several letters; and

finally, that words can be broken into syllables and sounds.

There’s a lot to learn. So, if a child is not read to at home, when they get to

kindergarten they’re going to be behind, and they may never catch up. It’s

estimated that by age five children that come from language-impoverished

environments have heard 32 million fewer words than middle class children. The

bottom line is the more language you hear, the better.

What about bilingual environments? The more language one is exposed to at

home, the better—even if it’s not the school language—because it’s actually pretty

easy for young children to learn a second name for an object. However, being

able to read English relies on the quality of language development of English,

which would mean paying attention to the phonemes and using a systematic

approach, not just relying on the idea that the child is just going to pick up

English automatically if they’re in a non-English speaking home.

Research shows that the earlier children become bilingual the better they’ll do

with both oral and written language. A bilingual brain seems to have both

linguistic flexibility and be better at multitasking. The thing is we do not want

children to be trying to learn a second language on top of trying to learn how to

read. I think that this has important implications for what we want to do for

children that are coming into our school systems. In the United States we now

have an increasingly large number of Hispanic children in our school systems,

and figuring out how we will be able to get them to learn English before they get

to school I think would probably represent a big challenge.


19

Wolf says—and this is just about children’s development in general—“Reading

never just happens. Not a word, a concept, or a social interaction is wasted in the

2000 days that prepare the very young brain to use all the developing parts that

go into reading acquisition.”

[music]

Now we have come up to the point at which the brain is ready to actually learn

how to read. We’ve done the language prep, and so now we’re going to look at

what happens in order for the brain to actually become a reading brain. Wolf

describes several processes that must occur, and I’m going to give you the names

for these processes and then briefly explain what they are. Don’t get hung up on

the long words that describe the names.

The first process is called phonological development, and this is just the ability to

hear a segment and understand small units of sound. Next comes orthographic

development, which means learning that the writing system represents language

—learning to recognize the letters and words. In fact, you have to be able to learn

to recognize the letters and words automatically before you can really become a

reader. Another aspect is semantic and pragmatic development; that is, learning

what the words mean.

Syntactic development just means learning to understand how the structure of

sentences gives them meaning. Finally there’s the morphological development,

which is learning how to recognize and use the roots of words, and suffixes, and

prefixes, and that sort of stuff. For all of these steps, the more the child is

exposed to written language the better will be his implicit and explicit

understanding of how all this works.

Now we are going to talk about the stages of learning to read that Wolf describes

in her book. She calls these the emerging pre-reader, the novice reader, the


20

decoding reader, and finally the fluent comprehending reader. And we’ll talk a

little bit about what is happening in the brain at these different stages. We have

so far been describing the stages that would be attributed to the stage known as

the emerging pre-reader. And the key idea again here is that reading doesn’t just

happen; that what is happening in this early period of language acquisition is an

important step of preparation.

Finally, the emerging pre-reader will become, hopefully, a novice reader. The

novice reading stage is the stage that involves both phoneme awareness and

learning how to put the sounds together as you read. The major discovery that

the novice reader has to make is that the letters connect to the sounds and how

the letters connect to the sounds. Interestingly, people who go on to be

successful readers very rarely get stuck at this stage. Even so, at this stage,

because of its close connection with sound, reading aloud is very important.

Orthographic development, which is learning how the writing system represents

the language, is also going on at this stage. The more you’re exposed to the

various familiar words, you get to where you can recognize those automatically.

So, this is the beginning of the role of repetition. And it’s especially important in

languages like English, where, for example, spelling can be very irregular. We

don’t have those wonderful perfect rules like the Greeks had. Semantic

development—that is, learning what words mean—is important at this stage also,

because it’s very much easier to read words that you know. Even so, at this stage

the child begins to learn to decipher the meanings of new words by context; a

skill that we continue to use from then on.

So, what’s happening in the brain of the novice reader? This is interesting. At

the early stages a young reader is using three large areas in both hemispheres.

The only time that an adult uses this much cortex is when they are faced with an

unfamiliar word. Another difference in adults is that adults use more frontal lobe

in their reading.


21

In the next stage the novice reader needs to become a decoding reader. This is

the stage at which we learn to be able to recognize what she calls sight chunks—

that is, to be able to see things like the roots of words, suffixes, and prefixes. The

sight chunks help us to begin to move toward some kind of fluent

comprehension. However, she says this is a very critical and even dangerous

stage. She says it’s not about speed, but about using all the tools that the child

has acquired fast enough to have time to think and comprehend. She says, “The

point of becoming fluid, therefore, is to read—really read—and understand.”

At this stage we have to also develop non-linguistic skills, such as we must have a

healthy working memory and we have to begin to use our frontal lobes.

Becoming fluent doesn’t insure comprehension, but it does give the executive

system time: time to start making inferences, to understand, to predict, to think

about what’s going to happen next; that kind of stuff. The key moment at the end

of this stage, Wolf says, is when the child can learn to go beyond the information

given—in other words, when fluency gives us time to think.

The final stage she describes as the fluent comprehending reader. But she says

that it’s difficult to move from accuracy and decoding to fluency. It’s difficult to

move from accuracy to fluency to the higher stages of reading. She says that

thirty to forty percent of fourth graders don’t become fluent readers with

adequate comprehension. Now, they might sound fine when they’re reading

aloud, but then if you ask them what they read they can’t tell you anything,

because they’re not reading really fast enough that they have time to understand

what they’re reading. So, decoding does not mean comprehension.

At the stage when we’re moving into this area where we learn to think between

the lines, so to speak, she says that it’s valuable for children to read things like

fantasy, which she considers to be an ideal training ground for moving beyond

the content and discovering what’s deeper. Reading material like fantasy helps


22

children to move from more concrete forms of cognitive processing into more

creative reading.

Since it’s so hard, how do we help children develop fluent comprehension? She

says that it requires two things for most children: explicit instruction by teachers

and the child’s desire to read. Now, when it comes to the child’s desire to read, I

think that illustrates the importance of making sure that we find something that

interests the individual child in order to motivate them. And then people like

Wolf are working to figure out how to create instructions that teachers can use for

the explicit instruction.

I have to admit I’m a little bit mystified by the idea of this explicit instruction,

since I’m one of those people who felt in looking back on reading, not that it just

happened, but I don’t really have the sense that someone taught me how to do it.

But clearly if we’re going to have more children make a successful transition to

become fluent readers we need to have better teaching methods.

The benefits of fluent reading may seem obvious, but I’ll mention a few. One is

that it makes it possible for the child to expand his boundaries by identifying with

the characters. And it gives the child something that they can use for their entire

life.

Now, once we have developed a fluent reading brain, what does this mean?

There are three things that the reading brain has to do. It has to recognize

patterns, it has to be able to do planning and strategy, and—this might surprise

you, or maybe not, based on previous podcasts—feeling. It turns out that a fluent

reader shows increased activation in the parts of the brain that are involved in

feeling. As I mentioned in several earlier podcasts, we have learned that emotion

and feeling are a key part in our intellectual processes and decision making. So, it

makes sense that a fluent reader would involve this part of the brain.


23

But, compared to a novice reader, the fluent brain expends a lot less effort. It

seems to retrieve relevant information by faster pathways. And there’s a diagram

of the difference between the pathways in the book on page 142. What was a

process that involved both hemispheres now uses a more efficient, usually left

hemisphere, pathway.

Now, this is important because this is what makes it possible for decoding to

become almost automatic, and now the bilateral areas can be used for meaning

and comprehension. It’s not just about buying time—although that’s a key

component—but also brain space for thinking. She says that for the first time the

brain becomes fast enough to think and feel differently. And this is the essential

requirement for being able to think and imagine while we read.

To summarize what we’ve done so far, we’ve learned that the first step in learning

how to read is acquiring language. Then we have to understand that the written

words represent spoken words. And finally we have to be able to decode fast

enough that the decoding process becomes automatic, so that we can actually

think about what we’re reading.

[music]

What are the implications for reading on the brain? For one thing reading makes

us more attuned to the sounds of our language. Brain scans show that non-

literate people handle language tasks differently than readers do. They seem to

use more of their frontal lobes, while the readers use the language areas in the

temporal lobe. It is not just the visual cortex that gets changed by reading. It

changes our auditory processing and it also involves areas of the brain involved in

perception, discrimination, analysis, representation and manipulation of speech

sounds.


24

What came to my mind when I was reading about how much all the different

parts of the brain are changed by reading, was the fact that I have been trying to

learn Spanish using a system called Pimsleur, which is a completely oral system—

it’s a tape you listen to and repeat back from. And I find myself constantly

wanting to know what the written words look like. In fact I find myself thinking,

well, how did I ever learn how to talk in the first place when I couldn’t read or

write, because now I can’t hear a word without trying to figure out what it would

look like, how to spell it, that sort of thing. So, to me that says my brain is

permanently changed by the fact that I know how to read.

It won’t surprise you to know that the changes in the brain depend upon what

language we speak. People who speak languages that have really regular rules,

like German and Italian, seem to access their temporal lobes more quickly. And

we’ve already talked a little bit about the differences that can be seen in the brains

of people who read Chinese and Japanese.

Wolf describes expert reading as being an ongoing process. She says the degree

of change that’s ongoing depends on what we read and how we read it. She

reminds us that every time we read we bring who we are at that moment to the

experience. That’s what makes reading a creative experience. She feels very

strongly about this, and she says on page 158, “Reading changes our lives and our

lives change our reading.” That’s the reason why you can read something that

you’ve read before and experience it in an entirely different way; because you’re

different every time you read it.

The last part of Proust and the Squid is about what happens when the brain can’t

learn how to read, with an emphasis on some ideas about what’s going on in

dyslexia. Obviously from what we’ve discussed so far there are a lot of places

where things can go wrong. For example, there could be a developmental failure

—that is, a failure of a key structure of the brain to develop—or, there could be

problems with achieving automaticity, that is, we can’t decode fast enough; or


25

problems with the connections between regions; or connections that deviate from

what is expected.

It turns out that this leads to a mixture of potential problems that don’t

necessarily occur in isolation. Fortunately the increased understanding that has

resulted from research by people like Wolf is leading to better treatments for

problems with reading. Now, like I said at the beginning, I don’t really have time

to get much into this aspect of the problem. However, if this is a subject that

really interests you, I think this book is a really good place to start.

The last thing that Wolf talks about after talking about what could go wrong with

learning how to read, is the question of what comes next. She’s wondering, as she

says, “Will the present generation become so accustomed to immediate access of

on-screen information that the range of attentional, inferential, and reflective

capacities in the present reading brain, will they become less developed?” She

wonders, I guess, whether or not this faster access to information is going to

diminish the time we spend thinking creatively. I, for one, wonder more about

the disappearance of writing and how important that will be.

A key idea that I want you to take away from this episode is the fact that not only

does reading not come naturally, but there is no one-size-fits-all way to teach

reading. Preparing to learn to read actually begins in infancy. The first step in

reading is learning language. Unfortunately, because of the dynamic relationship

between the brain’s contribution to reading and reading’s contribution to the

brain’s cognitive capacities, this may be one of those classic ‘the rich get richer

and the poor get poorer’ scenarios. I mean the more you read, the better you’re

able to read; the more you understand, the more your brain develops from the

process of reading. If you don’t read, there is evidence that your brain is going to

tend to be stunted in some of its potential from a cognitive standpoint.


26

Wolf reminds us that the key skill we want our children to acquire is being able to

go beyond the text. That’s the reason why she’s so concerned about them having

all this easy access to information on the Internet. She’s worried that they’re not

really learning how to think for themselves. She sort of echoes Socrates’ concerns

about the idea of having information without real knowledge.

I found myself thinking, however, that when a kid is copying something—say

cutting and pasting out of Wikipedia—I find myself wondering if that’s all that

different from what kids did when I was a kid. When I was a kid people copied

stuff out of the Encyclopedia Britannica. That was not what the best students

did. So, I think that the best students will always be the ones that are thinking

between the lines, and I’m not convinced that the Internet will destroy that

ability. But it certainly gives us something to think about, and something that

you might want to give your opinion on.

And the best place to give your opinion on this, or anything else in this episode, is

to go to the Discussion Forum at brainscienceforum.com. I’m trying to get people

to go to the Forum. I want to remind you that if you go to the Forum I will

automatically get a copy of what you submit, even if you don’t necessarily hear

back from me.

But you can send me email at [email protected]. And you can leave

comments at the website, brainsciencepodcast.com. If you go to the website I

hope that you will consider subscribing to the podcast if you aren’t already

subscribed. And you can also subscribe to the blog that’s on the website so that

you can get notices in between episodes.

[music]

Before I close I’d like to make a couple of announcements. I keep forgetting to

tell you about my other podcast, which is called Books and Ideas. And there’s a


http://www.brainscienceforum.com/

http://www.brainscienceforum.com/



http://www.brainsciencepodcast.com/


27

new episode of Books and Ideas out. It’s an interview with Dr. Pamela Gay from

the Astronomy Cast. You can find Books and Ideas on iTunes and at the website

booksandideas.com. I have a lot more subscribers to the Brain Science Podcast

than I do to Books and Ideas, so I’m really trying to get more of my regular

listeners to give Books and Ideas a try.

I want to apologize again for the fact that this episode is probably going to be

coming out about two weeks late. And although I did get the Books and Ideas

episode out the week that an episode of this should have come out, that’s no

excuse. I’m not going to bore you with the details about why we missed an

episode.

But I do want to tell you that the next episode will be back on schedule in two

weeks, and it is going to be an interview of Rolf Pfeifer, who wrote the book, How

the Body Shapes the Way We Think. Dr. Pfeifer is a professor at the University of

Zurich, and he’s going to be talking to us about how embodied artificial

intelligence tells us a lot about intelligence in general, and may even shed light on

how human intelligence works. I think you’ll find this to be a very fascinating

discussion.

Until next time, I hope you will go and check out Books and Ideas. And check out

the blog at brainsciencepodcast.com. Thanks again for listening. I look forward

to talking to you again soon.

[music]

The Brain Science Podcast is copyright Virginia Campbell, MD 2007 under the

Creative Commons Attribution No-Derivatives licence.

[music]

Transcribed by Lori Wolfson


http://www.booksandideas.com/

http://www.booksandideas.com/



http://www.loriwolfson.com

http://www.loriwolfson.com

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All errors or omissions responsibility of the transcriber


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