A brainy book about reading skills

If you're reading this section of the paper, then there's a good chance you like reading. But did you know that because you can read, your brain is differently wired from that of an illiterate person? Or that Chinese and Japanese speakers use different parts of the brain to read than we do? (Which should help you forgive the mangled English that occasionally comes out of those countries, like the sign in a Taiwan hotel apologising for the closure of the swimming pool: "Because of rainy day. The swimming pool pause opens! The inconvenient forgives please HouseKeeping department".) Or that, because of the language's eccentricities, children take a year longer to read English than they do when they learn Italian, German, or Finnish?

We take our reading skills for granted, but we shouldn't; and this book tells us what's going on in our brains when we read. (When I say it is a very brainy book, I am being literal as well as figurative: the book is crammed with drawings of brains, with areas given such imposing names as supramarginal gyrus or occipital-temporal area. Do not let these put you off.) It begins with the arresting proclamation: "We were never born to read." That is, there is nothing in our genetic makeup that determines literacy, in the way that there is something which determines how we digest, or see, or move. Reading involves getting two halves of the brain to work together: to get the part that sees and the part that talks to cooperate.

Sometimes they don't - and if you don't learn to read, your mind works differently. Portuguese scientists examined two different groups of rural dwellers: those who had been educated to read as children, and those who had managed to bypass that stage. They could both speak the language, of course, but when the non-readers were asked to repeat nonsense words like "benth" they would find it hard, and try to substitute similar-sounding words that actually meant something, like "birth". You or I might question the utility of getting a Portuguese peasant to say the word "benth", or its equivalent in Portuguese, but that is the kind of thing scientists get up to - and the research can have surprising implications.

This book is so thought-provoking that at times it feels as if one is being overloaded. Yet it is - except for some of the stuff about the supramarginal gyrus - quite easy to read. That, probably, is why it is so stimulating. Wolf covers a lot of ground very quickly. (As for the title: "Proust" stands for the reading brain, "the squid" for the anatomical study of nerve reflexes.) We zip from cuneiform (the initial great literate achievement) to Socrates, who was deeply suspicious of reading, which he said stifled independent thought: he attacked people who think "like papyrus rolls, being able neither to answer your questions nor to ask themselves". Well, thanks to Plato's writing down Socrates's words, we still have his objections to hand; but, as Wolf points out, Socrates's fears for the future of thought are very similar to our own fears for our children in the face of the instant-retrieval revolution of the internet.

If there is a continuous underlying theme in the book, it is, indeed, about the education of children. At what age should they start being taught to read? What's the best way to help them? (Read them poetry. It helps them distinguish phonemes.) Is the internet stunting their intellectual growth? (Probably not, but let us be vigilant.) And - she really goes into this in depth - what's the best way to deal with dyslexia? (I will not summarise her arguments and insights here, but the gist is that dyslexia is not necessarily bad news.) And the great thing we learn about reading is that, as we age, it just gets better and better. Describing her experience of reading Middlemarch half a dozen times - which itself bespeaks a high level of commitment to the written word - she winningly admits that she now sees things she didn't before: "I never thought I would see the day when I empathised with Mr Casaubon but now, with no small humility, I see that I do."