‘Dyslexia is our best, most vivid evidence that the brain was never wired to read,’’ writes Maryanne Wolf, and she’s got the word on why. Wolf is director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts and a professor of child development. She also has a son Ben, who went to the Rhode Island School of Design, draws like a dream - and is dyslexic. But more to my purpose, she’s the author of a madly fascinating book called “Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain’’ (Harper, 2007).
The book contains great, thought-provoking sections on dyslexia - an umbrella term for a variety of reading difficulties, by the way, not just scrambled letters. It also arc-lights the latest research on how our brains turn and catch on letters and words. It took 2,000 years for the human race to mature from grasping concrete symbolic systems like hieroglyphics, for instance, to abstract ones like the alphabet. Now it takes roughly 2,000 days for a child’s brain to arrive at a place where reading makes sense. And it’s not because of some “reading gene.’’ It’s a matter of new circuits being laid down in those areas of the brain mainly used for recognizing objects and pulling up their names. Children are wired for sound, as cognitive scientist and linguist Steven Pinker says, “but print is an optional accessory that must be painstakingly bolted on.’’
