Your brain on words

We are born with genes but we are raised with words. Our parents give us the genes to form the biological pieces that would spell life but it is with language — what we utter, read and write — that we make that life our own. I appreciated this even more after I spent a weekend engaged in a dual accidental tribute to words. I finished reading a book called Proust and the Squid The Story and Science of the Reading Brain at day and read/wrote poetry at night with some souls who also felt that the weekend presented itself as a good moment to write. I learned that indeed, reading is an unnatural act and that if we meet our ancestors of 200,000 years ago, they would probably ask us: how did you do it?

Reading is unnatural because while there are brain parts for breathing, walking, seeing, hearing, smelling or tasting, feeling or fleeing, there is no particular brain part for reading. There is no one brain part which when taken away would suddenly rob you of your ability to read. We rely on the same old brain — the same brain that we inherited from our Homo Sapiens ancestors 200,000 years ago when they appeared in Africa. This means that the same brain that hunted wildlife and walked thru Ice Ages is the same brain that can now read a book a day.

MaryAnne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Harper Perennial: NY 2007) is itself littered with beautiful passages about “reading” and how it continues to generate a whole universe inside our own skulls. When before, we acted only on what we encountered in raw nature, by reading, we now had to learn to discern the cloak of symbols in the alphabet. This did not require a new brain part but rather new connections between the neurons of old brain parts. That is how we were able to read using the same brain — we were able to forge new connections. It is like a city that has been in existence for a long time which suddenly transforms when new lighted bridges are constructed to connect its many pockets.

And this all happens in a half-second. A word triggers all the connections that need to be formed in order for it to be understood by a reader in that amount of time. Wolf guided me through the stages. Let us say the word is “dear.” From 0-100 milliseconds, our eyes see the letters and pays attention to their shape and form; 50-150 milliseconds, we begin to recognize the letter patterns differentiating it from other letters or words having other arrangements of the same letters as our eyes run “saccades” or little jerky movements back and forth around eight letters at a time; 100-200 milliseconds, we begin to mentally associate the letters to their corresponding sounds; and for the rest of the time to the 500th millisecond, the brain is busy trying to make up its mind on what this word means in that current context given its many associations.

For this half-second feat, all the signals from the regions of the brain that process visual, auditory, verbal cues would form a semantic sizzle in a sort of kitchen area in the brain called the angular gyrus which will coordinate all these signals. These signals are coordinated because of “myelin” present and complete in the brain. Myelin is some sort of special lining, like the oil that spreads the flavor in all the ingredients in a pan, between brain cells that would enable the signals to travel. What was really interesting is that this lining is not even completed till five to seven years of age for most humans. This means, according to Wolf and experts that she cited, that for our little ones who are yet to be introduced to the wonderful world of reading, it may not really help to force kids before they are six or seven to read. In fact, she cited many studies including a study across three European languages revealing that those who were made to learn to read at age five did less well than those who learned at seven. She was quite conclusive about this, while noting of course there are always exceptions.

But waiting till the kids are six years old to teach them to read does not mean that you are delaying their language skills. The usual storytelling with or without books and dinner-time talk apparently play a great role in making this transition to reading very fluid. That is why the Kariton Klasrum of Efren Penaflorida Jr. where he and his volunteers go around pushing a cart with books and reading to kids on the streets is really spelling a world of difference to those kids and their future.

When I first learned to read, I did feel like the universe rolled out an eternal book that I just had to inhabit. I just had to soak in every line that shoots and meanders, every new word that jumps and falls, and every swoosh of verse that zoomed across its pages. Reading and living were one and the same thing to me. It is the same with every person, at any age, when they first start to read.

All readers are revolutionaries. When you begin to read and write, you engage in the most unnatural, yet most revolutionary act in the history of human thought. By reading, we dare our own nature to do more with the same cards nature dealt our ancestors. By reading, we rage, and affirm that there is a more powerful language that can shape our life beyond the genetic alphabet of ATCG. By reading, you sculpt the biography of your own thoughts. You write the pages of your very own life.

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