The Reading Brain

I recently came across this book with an intriguing title at Kinokuniya during lunch time:

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

but because I had to hurry back to the office, I could not browse it then and there.

After my meeting had ended, I did a check on Amazon.com and here's an excerpt from the Washington Post review which caught my attention:

Anyone who reads is bound to wonder, at least occasionally, about how those
funny squiggles on a page magically turn into "Bare ruined choirs, where late
the sweet birds sang" or "After a while I went out and left the hospital and
walked back to the hotel in the rain." Where did this unlikely skill called
reading come from? What happens in our brain when our eyes scan a line of type?
Why do some of us, or some of our children, find it difficult to process the
visual information held in words?

Another review by a certain Dr R. Petty elaborated the central idea further:

She focuses on three fundamental principles that operate throughout the human
brain:

1. The capacity to make new connections among older structures

2. The capacity to form or appropriate regions of the brain that are specialized for
recognizing and extracting patterns in a mass of information

3. The ability to learn to recruit and connect information from these regions of the brain As a rider to the last point, the recruiting and connecting of different areas of the brain occurs automatically. If you think about someone you will usually be able to associate a visual image of him or her with a sound, smell and emotion. This associative process usually happens without conscious effort.

Maryanne's work indicates that these three principles of design provide the neural machinery essential to reading, and she spends some time explaining the evolution of what she calls the "reading brain."

But why the strange title? Dr Petty later elaborated that:

... Maryanne uses the French novelist Marcel Proust as a metaphor. He believed that reading gives us access to countless different realities that would otherwise be sealed from us. The squid is to pay tribute to the creature who has given so much to neurological research.

Interesting stuff, but would I borrow or purchase this book? I guess not. If I have little time for left for reading comics, I am not sure I could find time to read this book with over 300 pages.

BTW, this title is available in the form of books and audio-CDs at NLB's public libraries:


Title: Proust and the squid : the story and science of the reading brain
Author: Maryanne Wolf
Publisher: Thriplow : Icon, 2008.
Call No.: 612.82 WOL -[HEA]
Available at AMPL, BEPL, BIPL, CCKPL, QUPL, TPPL, WRL & YIPL

and:


Title: Proust and the squid [sound recording]
Author: Maryanne Wolf.
Publisher: [Minneapolis, Minn.] : Highbridge Audio, p2008.
Physical Description: 7 sound discs (8 1/4 hr.) : digital, stereo ; 4 3/4 in.
Call No.: AV 612.82 WOL -[HEA] pt. 7
Available at MPPL, QUPL & TPPL