Journal Entry 1 by Cassiopaeia from Cardiff, Wales United Kingdom on Friday, January 23, 2009

From Amazon
'We were never born to read' begins Maryanne Wolf in this pathbreaking exploration of how our brains learnt to read. 'No specific genes ever dictated reading's development. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we changed the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species'. From the history of the earliest known examples of written language, to whether reading online really is making us 'stupider', and why dyslexia can be a gift, "Proust and the Squid" will ensure you never again take for granted your ability to absorb the written word.

About the Author
Maryanne Wolf teaches at Tufts University and is Director of the Center for Reading and Language Research in Boston, USA. She teaches and lectures all over the world and is a renowned expert on the reading brain.
 

Journal Entry 2 by Cassiopaeia from Cardiff, Wales United Kingdom on Tuesday, June 23, 2009

This has been a fantastic read. This book takes you on a journey starting right back with the earliest writing systems and looks at how the human brain had to adapt and change to learn something it was never designed to do. There are interesting thoughts on how a particular language and its method of transferring the spoken words to written words has affected brain circuits and to my mind this would starts to give some understanding of why different cultures think in such different ways. Wolf also looks at the oral tradition versus the written and coming right up to date, wonders how the super fast acquisition of information today will affect brain development in the future. There are also some interesting chapters on dyslexia, which brings together a number of the more recent findings and looks at them in the context of brain development.

I think this book would be of interest to many people not just educators; it is well written and very accessible.