The Science & Magic of Reading

[Getty Images from The Guardian]

In previous posts I have discussed the magic of reading. Our brains have a tough time differentiating between actually experiencing something and reading about it. This is a strength, not a weakness. It allows us to empathize with others and strive to make change in a world we may see as having injustices. It also lets us communicate with beings from the collective unconscious--spirits that are bigger than one man or woman. They are representations of what society believes good or ill. A longed-for ideal like a knight, super hero, warrior, self-made businessman, pretty woman who chooses the right man and doesn't sleep around, the stereotypical white male, or the antihero. Celebrity icons like Jennifer Aniston, George Clooney, or Brad Pitt also become a 'brand' that can be sold. On the other end are evil images like the thug (usually a minority), the ogre, the slut, or the greedy tycoon. Thus Bernie Madoff, Lindsay Lohan, and George Zimmerman can represent the collective unconsciousness' negative ideas. Often these become warped and the villain is more idealized than the hero. We see this in Heath Ledger's Joker or Daniel Day Lewis' Daniel Plainview. Americans also appreciate a good redemption story, ala Robert Downey, Jr. These 'images' are not actually people, living, breathing, with motivations, victories and transgressions, they are an absolute (though ones which can be appreciated more or less with the values of the surrounding culture). They are not static, like words on a page. Words can give them life and release them to the real world. I have never read Twilight, but I know who Bella, Edward, and Jacob are. Books, in their own way, are talismans! They draw down the gods and hold them between two covers.

For my project, I began reading a book about reading (the irony is not lost on me or the author) titled Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read. The author, Stanislas Dehaene, is interested in the psychology of what most of us in the West do every day of our lives. What he suggests is that reading is not so easy after all. It is a complex process which entails chopping up parts of the word into 'morphemes' and reordering it inside our heads. "At first sight," Dehaene says, "reading seems close to magical: our gaze lands on a word, and our brain effortlessly gives us access to its meaning and pronunciation" (12). This is the first sentence inside the first chapter, and the author spends the rest of the book trying to disprove it by unlocking the 'algorithm' which we use to read. It begins with the fovea, "which [...] is the only part of the retina that is genuinely useful for reading" (13). The great difficulty with the fovea, however, is its inability to perceive beyond the 15 degrees within the 'visual field'. That means most of the words surrounding the one pin-pointed in your vision are indecipherable. We are also limited in how many words we can read per minute because of the speed of our 'saccades'. What most of us perceive as one smooth movement across the page is actually a series of jolts. Interestingly, when words are quickly flashed before us on a computer screen, we can read them much faster than we could from a book. Thus, our minds, which seem so geared toward something that they were not evolved for, have adapted well to it, though they still lack things that would make it easier. In fact, our eyes, Dehaene says, will not reveal a 'divine watchmaker'. They are far too imperfect.

Dehaene, to summarize further, writes:

"Our eyes impose a lot of constraints on the act of reading. The structure of our visual sensors forces us to scan the page by jerking our eyes around every two or three tenths of a second. Reading is nothing but the word-by-word mental restitution of a text through a series of snapshots. While some small grammatical words like 'the,' 'it,' or 'is' can sometimes be skipped, almost all content words such as nouns and verbs have to be fixated at least once" (17).

I mentioned earlier that words must be quickly taken apart in our head as we read--this requires a complex lexicon of symbols. We may not realize it, but upper and lower case figures generally do not have much connection with each other. On top of this variability, there are an endless catalog of fonts which we encounter. The brain has learned not only to memorize 26 characters but the variability which those characters come in. CaN yOu ReAd ThIs? HoW eAsIly? It goes to prove that your mind has learned the LeTtErs so well that it makes little distinction between a 'R' and 'r' or an 'E' and an 'e'. Dehaene gives another rather startling example: the words 'sight' and 'eight' seem to be a world apart but, in fact, are only one tiny line away. I commented in another blog on how I believed that each individual word was a picture we stored in our mind representing an absolute idea or thought--well, according to the author, the process has a tad more to it, but is generally the same. What we do is separate the word into 'graphemes'--that is the 'dead' in 'undead' or 'myth' in 'mythology'. For example, Dehaene says "our visual system automatically regroups letters into higher-level graphemes, thus making it harder for us to see that groups of letters such as 'ea' actually contain the letter 'a'" (24). Garage -- Medal -- Monkey -- Love -- Flag -- Please -- Meat -- in the last two, the 'a' is harder to notice because of this.

Leonard Shlain in The Alphabet versus The Goddess comments that "women have more rods in their retinas than men, and as a result, have better peripheral vision" (Shlain 26). This difference seems to come from man's original focus on the hunt. This act required pinpointing a target and using a sudden burst of energy. Women, on the other hand, were focused on raising children and gathering--these were not tasks that required tunnel vision but instead a wider one. They had to keep track of what the kids were doing as well as focusing on finding food for the community. It is a stereotype that women are better at multitasking, but this difference may actually be built into our brains. "Men" according to Shlain, "have more cones than women, allowing them to see one segment of the visual field in greater detail and with better depth perception than women" (26). Is it no surprise that it was men who greatly benefited from the invention of the alphabet? The task is dominated by advantages built into the masculine cranium. The narrow cone-vision of reading, the increasing importance of grammar and splitting the text into sentences, paragraphs, chapters, beginnings and endings. The literate, male mind has flourished because of this. It also deals better with abstract concepts like "freedom, economics, and destiny". "The ability," opines Shlain, "to conceptualize that the abstract words crime, virtue, punishment, and justice are all related is supremely human. To be able to leap from the particular and concrete to the general and abstract has allowed us to create art, logic, science, and philosophy" (22). (His indentations, not mine.) However, he also claims that this led to slicing up the Mother's wholeness. Literacy provided a catalyst for the males' usurpation of the female.