Reading in the Brain, Stanislas Dehaene

This was a really, really fascinating read, and surprisingly easy to grasp considering the technical subject. I actually read it surprisingly fast, and it was definitely the sort of book that provoked a lot of turning to my partner to ask “did you know that…”. It also made me ask a ton of questions of my mother about how I learned to read, why I learned to read late, etc, and honestly had me wondering if I should volunteer for a study on reading — the methods of reading and learning to read that Dehaene mentions don’t seem to apply to me, despite the studies backing up his hypotheses.

I can only really react to this book via my own personal experience/understanding, so this is going to veer off into anecdata a lot. On a purely intellectual level, it seems as if Dehaene’s theories are sound (although I’m not sure his model of synaesthesia is correct). Some of his phrasing was… mildly offensive to me, for example describing synaesthetes as “mostly not crackpots”. Why on earth would an intelligent person, a scientist, even connect synaesthesia with delusions? I know uninformed people sometimes do, but a scientist should know that the brains of synaesthetes genuinely cause them to experience (for example) words in colour, and not talk about them being “convinced” that they do, or describe them as “mostly not crackpots”.

Anyway, on an anecdotal level, Dehaene’s model doesn’t fit me at all. I didn’t/couldn’t learn to read via phonics. At all. I was eventually got reading via essentially the Whole Word method, and I still don’t connect graphemes and phonemes well at all. If I see a new word, I don’t actually think at all about how to pronounce it; I get the meaning from context, and mentally tag the image of the word with it. I only think about how to pronounce a word when I eventually find cause to say it (and then I will more often than not get it wrong). Dehaene not only thinks that doesn’t work as a way to learn words, but the model of dyslexia he proposes is essentially focused on that inability to connect phonemes and graphemes. By the logic in this book, I should be a very limited reader — yet from as quickly as a year after finally learning to read (and I was slow), I was routinely getting the reading score of an adult, and reading adult books fast and voraciously.

Probably there’s some crossover in the fact that I’m synaesthetic; as a child, I apparently complained that the books school gave me to learn from “tasted bad”. And given how terrible my visual skills (particularly the ones located in the same area of the brain Dehaene identifies as the brain’s word form area) are, I’ve got to wonder if maybe learning to read without the phonetic route caused more of my brain to specialise in reading than average.

In any case, it’s a fascinating topic and Dehaene’s book is mostly very readable and, as far as I can tell, mostly inoffensive — though the way he talks about synaesthetes makes me wonder if dyslexic people might also be less than pleased with the descriptions here. I’m definitely going to look up other pop science (or maybe even some studies) about how reading works in the brain; I’d like to know if any other theories describe my way of reading better, and what developments have emerged since this book was written.

Rating: 4/5

The Undivided Past, David Cannadine

I’m not sure if I’ve totally grasped the point of this book, because if I have, it seems very simplistic: basically, that none of the great dividers between people (religion, nationality, class, gender, etc) are actually as divisive as we think, and that they haven’t been historically either — that men and women have cooperated in societies before now, that Islam and Christianity have coexisted, etc, etc. If there’s really a trend for historians to claim that’s not so, then it does make sense to offer a counterpoint, but it’s not really a point of view I’ve ever seen. While people might not have been talking about intersectionality under that name for so long, I think it’s always been obvious that it exists.

So, in that sense, Cannadine’s book reads as though he’s setting up a series of strawmen to knock down. Of course religion doesn’t divide us wholly — nor does it unite us, as he shows by talking about the quarrels between Catholics and Protestants, or Sunni and Shiite Muslims. Of course there’s been cooperation between genders, between nations, and of course there has been conflict between them. To me, a lot of this seemed very obvious, and hardly worth spending so much ink and paper discussing why it proves that no one identity divides (or unites) man.

If the call is ultimately for unity, one still has to wonder — on the basis of what? Humanity? But the time is coming, if it hasn’t already come, where we could dispute the boundaries of humanity. If you rely on machines to survive, are you human? Are your interests aligned with “humanity”? Once almost any organ can be replaced with an artificial one, is a person in receipt of a lot of those surgeries still human, with the same preoccupations and needs as the rest of us? (My answer would be yes, but it’s a thing which has yet to be debated politically and socially, outside of science fiction.)

Also, I think it’s already showing its age, and it was published in 2013. There’s been no movements based on male identity, according to Cannadine — but Men’s Rights and GamerGate have been a thing. And there’s no modern feminism? What about EverydaySexism, etc?

The book is still a worthwhile survey of the divisions between us and how significant (and not) they’ve been, but if I understood the thesis correctly, then it’s not exactly groundbreaking.

Rating: 2/5

Being Mortal, Atul Gawande

Death and ways of dying is a thing that a lot of people don’t like to think about, but which is really, really important, and Atul Gawande’s book treats the issues with sensitivity, thought and a wisdom born of experience. It’s not just a doctor’s point of view on death, but an educated look at the ways people die in our society, how things can be different, and a personal point of view — as well as talking about his patients, Gawande talks about his own father’s experience of dying.

It’s not a cold and clinical book, at all; in fact, I found myself crying while reading parts of it. I don’t necessarily always agree with Gawande (I think that voluntary euthanasia and better end of life care can and should co-exist, while he is much more cautious about whether allowing euthanasia causes people to pay less attention to providing better palliative care), but I do respect his point of view and his careful exploration of the facts. He discusses different ways of running nursing homes, different case studies, and different approaches to death and dying, and never did I feel that he was seeing an illness instead of a patient, a problem to be solved instead of a person.

I think this is a very worthwhile read for doctors, for patients, for young people and old people, for carers… for everyone. These are discussions that need to be had. My family know what I want to happen if I were to be ill without hope of recovery, when I would want the life support machines turned off, that I would want my organs to be available for transplants, etc. Do yours?

Rating: 5/5

Talking Hands, Margalit Fox

Talking Hands is in part the story of the development of sign languages around the world, and in part an exploration of the development of language and how that might have occurred in human history. The little Bedouin settlement which is the main case study is a place where a sign language has arisen independently of other sign languages, and its development has mirrored that of the development of spoken languages in ways which may reveal important things about the way the human brain handles language.

Most of the neurological stuff wasn’t new to me, and it’s definitely on a level any reader can appreciate; it doesn’t go into massively technical terms, or dissect vast case studies about the way injuries affect the brain, etc. The historical context of sign language and how people treated deaf and dumb people in the past was newer for me. I wasn’t aware, for example, that for ages people — even deaf people — considered sign language inferior because it lacked the sort of grammar people recognised. It was even suppressed in favour of cumbersome sign language which followed word-for-word the pattern of spoken language, ignoring the potential for a spatial grammar.

Margalit Fox comes across as a science writer rather than a scientist, making the book very accessible — either on its own, or as a complement to more in-depth works about language like Steven Pinker’s. I didn’t find it as fascinating as her book on decrypting Linear B, but her writing is clear and concisely informative, and I enjoyed reading the book. I wasn’t always sure about the way she characterised actual people; I wouldn’t find some of those descriptions very flattering/respectful… but she did write it with the approval and help of the team working in the Bedouin village, according to her introduction, and it’s never disrespectful about disability or intelligence.

Rating: 4/5