Proust and the Squid - Chapter 1

Proust and the Squid take you on a history journey of cultures, the brain and how writing, reading and the brain reading developed. The first chapter is completely an introduction of what is to come later in the book. The entire book consists of three areas 1. The early history of how we learned to read from Sumerians to Socrates; 2. The development of the human life cycle as we learn to read in astute ways over time; 3. The story and the science of what happens when the brain cannot learn to read. French novelist Marcel Proust was used as a metaphor in the book and the unappreciated squid as analogy for two complete opposite parts of reading. Proust believed was a peaceful place people went to gain intelligence. Because we have obtain access to thousands of different realities just by reading. The Squid was used in the 1950s to figure out how neurons repair and get by when something goes wrong. She merged Proust and the squid together because of what the human brain must do to read and what it does to adapt when something isn't right. This whole explanation reminded me of James Paul Gee's article about immersion and how people adapt when they don't know exactly what to do. Learning to read begins when we are infants. When our parents hold us and read stories to us. How often it does or does not happen in the first five years of life will determine reading later in life. When families surround their children with that are rich in oral and written language they slowly start to move away from those children whose family did not. Thirty-two million words separate and child that was exposed to oral and written language from a child that was not. When someone cannot read because of something like dyslexia science likes to look at the brain and its wiring because many people with dyslexia have trouble reading, discriminating individual sounds or giving the name of a color. Observing the brain gives lots of information about how a dyslexic brain operates.