Many of you already know that I'm an admirer of Stanislas Dehaene, whose book Reading in the Brain maps the evolution and neuroscience of reading. "Evolution" is almost the wrong word -- the brain didn't evolve to read (reading/writing came too late in our history), but instead adapted other dedicated recognition and relay functions, kind of like hotwiring a car.

I was excited to read Alison Gopnik's review of Reading in the Brain in the NYT, which makes several points relevant to both the future of the book and the Bookfuturist approach. Here are a few blockquotes:

At this very moment, you are actually moving your eyes over a white page dotted with black marks. Yet you feel that you are simply lost in the universe of The New York Times Book Review, alert to the seductive perfume of a promising new novel and the acrid bite of a vicious critical attack. That transformation from arbitrary marks to vivid experience is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. It’s especially mysterious because reading is a relatively recent invention, dating to some 5,000 to 10,000 years ago. Our brains didn’t evolve to read...

Every time you complete a word recognition security test on a Web site, you are paying unconscious homage to the sophistication and subtlety of the reading brain. The most advanced spambots can’t even recognize letters as well as we can, let alone recover the meaning that lurks behind them...

In one of the most interesting chapters, he argues that the shapes we use to make written letters mirror the shapes that primates use to recognize objects. After all, I could use any arbitrary squiggle to encode the sound at the start of “Tree” instead of a T. But actually the shapes of written symbols are strikingly similar across many languages.

It turns out that T shapes are important to monkeys, too. When a monkey sees a T shape in the world, it is very likely to indicate the edge of an object — something the monkey can grab and maybe even eat. A particular area of its brain pays special attention to those significant shapes. Human brains use the same area to process letters. Dehaene makes a compelling case that these brain areas have been “recycled” for reading. “We did not invent most of our letter shapes,” he writes. “They lay dormant in our brains for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet."

One analogy I sometimes use when telling people about this is that our written characters are constrained by our brain structure in the same way that our spoken phonemes are constrained by the shape of the human mouth. Nearly every language only makes use of a subset of those possibilities -- some languages are tonal and others aren't, some languages distinguish between a voiced and a voiceless "th" sound (or an "f" and "v" sound) and others don't. Even regional accents and dialects within languages skew these phonemes in different ways.

Within those constraints, you get huge variations -- but nobody (except for speakers of sign language) is using signs that can't be made by the mouth. Ditto, systems of writing, whether alphabets, abjads (vowelless syllabaries like ancient Hebrew and Arabic), ideograms/hieroglyphs, or some combinations of these are incrediblly varied, yet actually fall within a comparatively narrow range of possibilities.

If you're a speaker or reader of a language, your brain quickly adapts to recognize sounds and characters that are significant in that language and screen out ones that aren't -- which exaggerates the strangeness of a foreign character set. The brain screens out what look like squiggles and tiny differences in script just as it screens out what sounds like noise and tiny differences in tone, because it's been trained to recognize only certain kinds of differences as making a difference. The same system that lets us recognize a cursive manuscript "A" and one printed in Helvetica as the same letter also screens out a Hebrew Aleph, even if both have the same ideogrammic origin.

You could (and Gopnik does) extend this argument from symbols to the entire ecology of reading and writing -- whether symbols are presented vertically or horizontally, from right to left or left to right or serpentine, and yes, whether one is reading on a codex or scroll, paper or a screen. All are within human capabilities -- yet just as some people find it more difficult than others to learn to speak or read a new language, some find it more difficult than others to learn to read a new medium.

Reading also tells us a tremendous amount about the brain as such. It also contributes to the whole overplayed "blank slate" debate. The fact that reading serves as a kind of middle voice between biological innateness and plasticity (while Dehaene's sympathies lie with the former, his evidence often supports the latter) lets Gopnik intervene against Pinker, Chomsky, and co.

We are born with a highly structured brain. But those brains are also transformed by our experiences, especially our early experiences. More than any other animal, we humans constantly reshape our environment. We also have an exceptionally long childhood and especially plastic young brains. Each new generation of children grows up in the new environment its parents have created, and each generation of brains becomes wired in a different way. The human mind can change radically in just a few generations.

These changes are especially vivid for 21st-century readers. At this very moment, if you are under 30, you are much more likely to be moving your eyes across a screen than a page. And you may be simultaneously clicking a hyperlink to the last “Colbert Report,” I.M.-ing with friends and Skyping with your sweetheart.

We are seeing a new generation of plastic baby brains reshaped by the new digital environment. Boomer hippies listened to Pink Floyd as they struggled to create interactive computer graphics. Their Generation Y children grew up with those graphics as second nature, as much a part of their early experience as language or print. There is every reason to think that their brains will be as strikingly different as the reading brain is from the illiterate one.

Should this inspire grief, or hope? Socrates feared that reading would undermine interactive dialogue. And, of course, he was right, reading is different from talking. The ancient media of speech and song and theater were radically reshaped by writing, though they were never entirely supplanted, a comfort perhaps to those of us who still thrill to the smell of a library.

But the dance through time between old brains and new ones, parents and children, tradition and innovation, is itself a deep part of human nature, perhaps the deepest part. It has its tragic side. Orpheus watched the beloved dead slide irretrievably into the past. We parents have to watch our children glide irretrievably into a future we can never reach ourselves. But, surely, in the end, the story of the reading, learning, hyperlinking, endlessly rewiring brain is more hopeful than sad.

Sounds like a Bookfuturist manifesto to me.