Philip Davis

Mind Over Matter

Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

By

Icon Books 288pp £12.99 order from our bookshop

This is a silly title for a good book. Telling her story of the evolution of ‘the reading brain’, Maryanne Wolf, Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, has little to say about squids at the lower end of the scale and not much of interest about Proust at the higher. But she does insist that reading ‘does not come as naturally to our children as vision or spoken language, which are pre-programmed’. Evolution primed human brains for oral language but not for the extraction of meaning from print. There are no genes specific to reading. ‘We were never born to read.’

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • Why did the 'bold and determined' Empress Matilda never manage to become Queen regnant? Peter Marshall reviews a n… ,
    • From the Archive: Martyn Bedford on Ian McEwan's 'Atonement' ,
    • In 'Silenced Voices' reports the ongoing story of the human rights lawyer, Nasrin Sotoudeh, who has been… ,
    • The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity has long been agonised over. But what do we know about his victims?… ,
    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    Follow Us