How is the brain wired for reading?
Many of us bookworms take reading for granted. Sounds like a silly thing to say, right? Well consider this, our brains were not "designed" for reading. At least not initially.
I came across a review of the book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain from the Telegraph and couldn’t help but write a post on the subject. I normally don’t write posts about book reviews, but this one seemed particularly suitable since the review itself is a very good read.
First off, the brain is an incredible organ, to say the least. Computer science hasn’t really come close to matching the processing power of our brains. And one of the great things about the human brain is its ability to change and evolve over time. Yet, surprisingly, the act of reading was never really wired into our brains from the beginning:
One important thing to bear in mind is that our brains did not evolve to read. They evolved to hunt and gather, make campfires and so on. This means that reading is an act of improvisation – when you read, you’re actually using parts of the brain that were designed to do other things. You are, as it were, patching together several different technologies.
Another interesting tidbit is that your own brain evolves over your lifetime and reading can make a huge difference in the way you think about things, solve problems and so forth:
Reading, says Wolf, changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you fit the words together into sentences.
When stripped down to the bare essentials, as the quote above does, reading is a very abstract activity. The real-world object and a word that represents that object have nothing in common. For example, the word "apple" obviously brings up an image in your mind of a red (or green) fruit that grows from a tree. But the word "apple" itself has no direct link to the real-world fruit it refers to. Heck, we can even give "apple" a whole new meaning if we so desired, but getting people to accept that meaning might prove difficult.
What does this mean for you?
The obvious answer is that you should keep reading. More importantly, however, it shows that reading really does have a direct impact on the brain. In the world we live in today, we no longer rely on hunting and gathering to survive. Nowadays information and knowledge is what you need to get by. Reading equips the human brain to not only process that information, but also helps us to think about it in new ways.
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