Proust and the Squid summary

Writing as we know it was invented in different parts of the world several times throughout history.

The Sumerian cuneiform, a writing system composed of wedge-like marks that look a lot like bird tracks, and Egyptian hieroglyphs, are two of the best-studied early writing systems. They originated entirely independently from one another around 3200 BCE in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.

If there’s one thing most experts on reading agree on, it’s that there’s no such thing as “too early” when it comes to reading to your child. Long before they understand a single word, children’s brains start preparing them for the formidable task of reading.

The key message here is: The foundation for reading is laid early in a child’s life.

Reading researcher Glenda Bissex has many charming stories to tell from when her children learned to read. Once, while she was distracted reading a book, her five-year-old son slipped her a note reading “RUDF.” When she asked what it was supposed to mean, he rolled his eyes. Clearly, he had written “R-U-D-F,” or “Are you deaf?” because she hadn’t reacted to his previous attempts to get her attention.

The key message in this blink is: Children move through five stages of reading development, from pre-reader to expert.

Once children cross the bridge from decoding to reading expert, whole new worlds await them. Through the power of their reading brains, they are now able to explore the mythical lands of Middle Earth, Narnia, and Hogwarts, where nothing is ever as it seems. But it doesn’t stop there.

The key message here is: We never stop learning to read. 

What do Leonardo Da Vinci, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein have in common? They were all dyslexic. 

Einstein often talked about his terrible memory for written text, and once admitted that words “did not seem to play any role” in his theoretical thinking.

In spite of how we talk about it, dyslexia is not actually a “reading disorder.” It can’t be, because the human brain was never actually meant to read. As we learned in the last blink, whatever prevents a dyslexic brain from learning to read must be caused by some variation in its deeper, more basic structures.

But how does the different wiring of dyslexics affect their other skills?

When the ancient Greeks first started writing, not everyone was happy about it. Famous philosopher Socrates, who lived in ancient Greece right around the time writing became popular, rejected the new technology outright. He feared that writing would make human thought more inflexible, corrupt our memory, and fool us into taking all written information for granted. Interestingly, these are pretty much the same arguments that critics make about the internet today.

This brings us to the following question: What happens to our reading brains in the digital age, when we have vast amounts of information at our fingertips and text is more dynamic and changeable than ever before? Will technology unlock whole new features of our brain? Or will it make us unlearn some of the very skills that helped create it?