Reading in the BrainStanislas Dehaene; Penguin 2010WorldCat•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

Early into Reading in the Brain I knew I had found a very good book, packed with research and informed insight. As I began to read it, however, I noticed something odd. I was struggling with the Kindle edition I had purchased. I found myself wanting to physically grapple with the device more than the buttons would allow. The book contains diagrams that are useful to consult when reading the text but I could not easily cross-reference them. The book is lengthy and I found it difficult to track progress without the thickness of a print book. I had already enjoyed a few novels on my Kindle without this problem. This material was more challenging. I have read many similar scientific books before but always in print. For analytical reading the absence of tangible pages felt like a phantom pain. What was happening? Dahane’s book was compelling enough, and the digital challenge troublesome enough, to merit a second purchase of the more expensive print edition. The completed reading answered my question.

The reading paradox

Dahaene begins with the reading paradox. Our brains evolved over millions of years without writing. How is it that we can read? The hardware of our brains has not evolved in the mere 5000 year history of writing. New studies repeatedly show that the brain is more plastic that we thought but no so plastic as to invent new structures for reading. Dahaene explains that reading became possible for humans because we had the good fortune to inherit cortical areas that could link visual elements to speech sounds and meanings. Our limited plasticity allowed us to recycle existing brain circuitry.

Learning to read still takes years of training. It starts with visual recognition of shapes, e.g., “T” and “L”. The brain learns to detect subtle differences in words, e.g., “eight” vs “sight” while ignoring big ones, e.g., “eight” vs “EIGHT”. We do not scan words letter by letter from left to right like a computer program, but instead encode units of meaning for easy look-up, e.g, the morpheme “button” in “un-button-ing”.  The brain uses two pathways in parallel, sound and meaning, to reconstruct the pronunciation of the word. With sufficient training and practice reading seems virtually effortless.

We are not born to read. The only evolution that occurred was cultural — we optimized reading over the centuries to suit the brain. One more thing is needed. Why are cultural phenomena like reading so uniquely developed in humans? Dahaene attributes it the evolution of our prefrontal cortex. “My proposal is that this evolution results in a large-scale ‘neuronal workspace’ whose main function is to assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge.” The workspace allowed us to exploit the cognitive niche made possible by neuronal recycling.

My brain needs re-training for reflective reading of e-books

I was struck by the tight coupling of brain structures with their physical counterparts in the world. Learning to read, the brain becomes encoded with the specific shapes and sounds of words. The aim of reading is still to reconstruct the original physical speech utterances. The skills required for processing text should be mostly transferable from print to digital books. After all, the text is still there. Indeed I find the reading of light or familiar material to be nearly equivalent on an e-reader.

When words are less familiar some slowness is to be expected. As Dehaene explains, we perform extra processing to decipher letters for rare or novel words before attempting to access their meaning. When words, sentences and paragraphs combine to express complex ideas much more processing is required. Reduced reading speed can be expected for reading abstract and challenging material regardless of the medium. To be sure, I wrestle with print books, snapping pages when I am unconvinced, wearing the binding from too much turning, attacking the text with a pen. I experienced this with the print edition of Reading in the Brain. I experienced a greater challenge when using the e-reader. How come?

I speculate a connection between reading technology and access to the neuronal workspace. Dahaene argues that literacy changed to suit the structures of the brain. The print book, the codex, is two thousand years old, a design that surpassed the scroll. It is an evolution of technology, finely tuned to our neurons to optimize reading. I can compel its knowledge. We assume the e-reader represents an advance on print because it embodies digital technology. Integrated with the web, it is easier to discover, purchase, search and link to other material. The text is readily ported to an e-reader and I can adjust its font-size for readability or play it aloud for listening. Still, the pages are continuous like the older scroll format. More important, I think, the global analysis functions are inferior to that of a print book: the single stream of focus, parallel access to pages, easy turning and cross-referencing across any two points. These are reflective reading functions that are used to “assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge,” the functions served by the neuronal workspace. If you think I am cutting too fine a point, recall the tight coupling between brain structures and the world.

I am certain that my brain is already being reprogrammed to work more efficiently with e-books. It is happening to all readers. This phase of re-training  explains some of the fourty year delay in the popular adoption of e-books. If my speculation is correct, e-reader design must evolve again if it is to finally compete equally with the print book. We have only seen the invention of a digital scroll but have yet to witness a truly digital codex. What would a digital codex look like? I offer a suggestion. The print codex introduced facing pages, a dual pane interface that has been mimicked by some e-reader designers. This effect could be amplified using multiple tabs like modern browsers, but within the e-reader. Better yet, I would like to be able to create any number of independent digital pages (or portions thereof) on a single digital desktop, all available at once in full-size for parallel processing. This is not the same as a browser with web content. It matters that the content is still unified within a dedicated reading device.

Reading is always at risk

E-books only make us stupid because we argue about them. While print is still the superior technology for reflective reading, if a truly digital codex was invented I would be the first in line to get one. Dehaene’s book focuses my attention on two more serious concerns. First, we are not born to read. The alphabet and literacy are cultural inventions finely tuned to our brains. Every generation must go through the hard work of learning to read. The internet does not offer a shortcut to knowledge. Second, the invention of reading re-purposed existing neural circuitry. Dahane suggests the mental “letterbox” we use for recognizing letters may have once been used for identifying animal tracks, a skill we have lost. Cortical reorganization is a competition, a zero sum game. As we re-train our brains for digital technology what skills will be lost? The capacity for long-form reflective reading, perhaps. Reading is always at risk.

The God Delusion
Richard Dawkins; Mariner Books 2008
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It took many long thoughts before I was ready to write a response to The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins. I have tossed a lot of things in my religion closet over the years and was overdue for the cleaning this book provided. I still feel a bit raw.

I will give you my personal context as briefly as possible. I grew up in a fundamentalist church, believing the literal heaven and hell story as a child, rejecting it as a teen, and settling with agnosticism as an adult. I look back at the childhood experience as a positive one. I read the bible multiple times and can speak knowledgeably about it. It fashioned me into a reader and a philosophical thinker. Like any teen I decried hypocrisy. In truth most Christians were better people than their principles. My main contention was the general unwillingness to admit the religious story might be wrong. I still root out the occasional blind spot caused by fundamentalism but today I feel easily clear of its influence. I had settled into a cozy agnosticism when Dawkins’ book came along. I am not a new atheist and will not begin deriding theists. In fact, I am clearer on the role of religion though uncritical theists will not find in me an easy ally.

I am religious, just like Dawkins. In the opening chapter Dawkins describes a feeling, a profound sense of wonder at the vastness of the universe. The same feeling has been shared in religious terms by Sagan, Einstein, Hawking and other scientists. When these scientists talk about God they are doing so in a poetic sense. The God Delusion, says Dawkins, is not an attack on their God. No, his attack is not on the poetic thinkers but on the literalists. Put crudely, those who believe the fairy tale of a guy in the sky, waiting for you with pie when you die. Creation, heaven and hell, Jesus dying to save your immortal soul then coming back to life, miracles, the stuff you learn in Sunday school. Dawkins is using a rhetorical strategy. You can make a bold claim — God is a delusion — if you exclude all good thinking on the subject and only focus on a straw man. Like Dawkins, I reject the fairy tale and instead use religion poetically. Thing is, we are not all eloquent poets. Many theists use the language of religious tradition but the essence of their belief is the same awe at the grandness of nature. I dusted off my old Psalter Hymnal and its Confession of Faith begins by saying that we know God by the “creation, preservation, and governance of the universe”. Argue if you must, the religion begins with a naturalist testament, just like Dawkins.

God is not a empirical question. Either he exists or he doesn’t, says Dawkins. Who is being simple-minded? Tackling the origins of the universe Dawkins considers the two hypotheses of creation and evolution. Intelligence, he argues, occurs at the end of a process, i.e., evolution, not at the start, i.e., creation. In fact, that is only truly in a local context. According to physics, the universe was highly ordered matter, a singularity, and history has been the unfolding of the big bang. This is entropy, the second law of thermodynamics. The order or intelligence is found at the start of the process. My point is that big questions do not have simple true or false answers. There is the middle value, “mu”, often excluded, which rejects the context of the question as too small. Agnosticism seems a sensible response, but like the religion of the scientists, Dawkins argues away the agnosticism of great thinkers like Huxley.

Religion is poetry and we cannot live without it. Whenever one talks about God and the singularity the inevitable retort is that we are placing God in the “gaps”, the unknown things science hasn’t figured out yet. Yes, I say. That’s right. God is a poetic or mythological concept for mystery, the things we do not understand. Religion is false in the same way that Shakespeare is false. The events of his stories probably did not happen, but this does not stop us from retelling the stories, enacting them for audiences again and again. We quote his lines. It affects our decisions and changes our lives. Poetry, mythology, fiction, we constantly underestimate the vital role of these things in our lives.

Genuine religious belief is not consoling. New atheists explain religion as a comfort factor. Genuine religious belief is not consoling. Believers are challenged to reflect carefully on their thoughts and actions, live up to a rigourous moral code, and sacrifice their wants for the needs of others. It is a wonder that anyone would want to be religious. Dawkins provides a better explanation. A meme functions like a gene, but causing ideas to reproduce instead of DNA. Religious ideas are memetic because they require acceptance without question. It is a brilliant explanation. Modern theists accept the value of doubt but only as a step to greater faith. Not good enough. Genuine faith must be subject to constant critical examination. Not comfortable at all.

 Athiesm abets the ascendant religion of consumerism. I sometimes forget how powerful the pro-religious, anti-science lobby is in the United States. It explains some of the militance of the new atheist movement. Even in Canada, the pro-religious lobby is currently rising along with conservative politics and I oppose it. Still, on a larger scale, I observe the waning of Christianity and other religions as consumerism rises to replace them as the new religion. Atheism abets consumerism by overstating its rejection of religion. Dawkins, like me, is religious in a poetic sense, but unfortunately he reserves it as a special case. Without some poetry or mythology to imagine the unknown, we are reduced to creatures of physical matter alone, admitting only the things we can touch and taste, serving the economics of our want.

The Bhagavad Gita
Eknath Easwaran; Vintage 2000
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A hundred years ago a wise old professor of mine recommended reading The Bhagavad Gita. I put it on my “to read” list but only read it yesterday. The reading was prompted by another, The Razor’s Edge, in which a pilgrim finds his way through books to enlightenment. Among them was the Upanishads, of which the Gita is considered a beautiful and accessible work. Of course I do not presume to “review” the Gita, but offer this brief reader’s response to it.

The Gita is the story of Arjuna, an Indian prince the night before battle. A powerful army has gathered to deny his rightful claim to the throne. He does not want to fight because the army contains members of his family. He receives counsel from Krishna, an apparent charioteer but in fact Lord Vishu, greatest of the Indian gods. The battle is a metaphor for the spirtual struggle, and Krishna provides personal guidance on the paths to enlightenment.

Enlightenment. Is it possible? I do not find it difficult to defend a world view that does not include a higher order or design, but I do so with diminishing conviction. There is sufficient complexity to evolution in a modern sense to explain a moral life, goodness for one’s people and future generations. Still, evolution is a downward-up drive. Up to where? If there is no higher order, is there only complexity expanding into entropy? I sometimes wonder if the brain of the atheist must finally collapse. The Gita speaks of shradda. Wrong shradda is sinking with the downward pull of our evolutionary past, not evil, only ignorant, leading to failure. Right shradda is consistent with the upward thrust of evolution, yielding better results. Easwaran says that shradda is more than faith, it is the belief system that defines a life, “One person with a serious illness believes he has a contribution to make to the world and so he recovers; another believes his life is worthless and he dies: that is the power of shradda.”

The Gita is not heavy with theology. Krishna explains that there are two main paths, one of knowledge and meditation for the few who prefer a life of solitude and contemplation. The more likely path is that of love and service, the path of action suited to most of us who prefer to live among others in the world. The paths ultimately reach the same end. A core Buddhist message is the impermanence of the ego, the illusion of a soul. “The ego’s job is to go on incessantly spinning the wheel of the mind and making new karma-pots: new ideas to act on, fresh desires to pursue.” Solitude gives a taste of egolessness since there are no other egos to bump against. The path of action exhausts the ego, yielding the same result. It is this path of action that Krisha recommends to Arjuna, faced with his difficult situation. Conditionality is our existence and Arjuna cannot escape the battle that is before him.

Arjuna must face his fears, but that is not the last word. A recurring theme in the Gita is to renounce attachment to the outcomes of our actions. We choose only our actions, and should make each act with care, an act of worship, an offering, but the results are beyond our control and should not engage us. It is the calculus of the serenity prayer, more familiar to modern readers.

The razor’s edge: a novelW. Somerset Maugham; Triangle books, the Blakiston company 1946WorldCat•Read Online•LibraryThing•Google Books•BookFinder

The Razor’s Edge by Somerset Maugham is the story of Laurence “Larry” Darrell, a young man who returned from war existentially troubled by the death of a close friend. Larry leaves his fiancée, Claire, for a year in Paris where he believes he can think through his troubled thoughts to their end. On his small veteran’s pension he rents a quiet room and studies, learning Greek to read classics in their original tongue, living a life of the spirit. Originally published in 1944, I had a 1946 hard cover (with double-spaced sentences) on my shelf for years and just recently read it. I reveled in every yellowed page of this monastic fantasy.

When Claire comes to Paris to fetch Larry after his year away, he declares his intention to continue. “‘But Larry’, she smiled. ‘People have been asking those questions for thousands of years. If they could be answered, surely they’d have been answered by now’”. Larry thinks she has said something shrewd. “But on the other hand you might say that if men has been asking them for thousands of years it proves that they can’t help asking them and have to go on asking them.” Larry goes on travelling, ultimately finding his way to a monastery in India.

The defining moment for me in The Razor’s Edge is not the moment of Larry’s enlightenment, not the shuddering of his head as he awakens, and not the mountain vista as he fathoms the interconnectedness of all things. It was his action just after his enlightenment that stuck with me, the moment when Larry burns his books. The burning scene is not in the text of Maughm’s book, but it was added in the 1984 movie adaptation by John Byrum, starring Bill Murray in a rare serious role. I had seen the movie some years ago. It was the burning scene that brought me to the book this many years later.

I think often about books and their role in enlightenment. I think traditional literacy is essential in learning and “scientific” enlightenment. I also feel that “transcendental” enlightenment is post-literate. I wanted to read more on this matter, but it was not in the book. Byrum might have added the burning scene for its visual effect on the screen, but I think there is more to it. The road to enlightenment has traditionally been a literary one. In The Pilgrim’s Progress,  Christian begins his journey after being troubled by “the book in his hand”. Chris McCandless’ pilgrimage to Alaska had its start and finish in literature. The print version of The Razor’s Edge is narrated by the author, Maugham, serving as a messenger between the different worlds of Larry and Claire, and providing a more mature frame of reference. In the 1984 movie, Maugham’s character is absent. The powerful functions of Maugham, including the final dreadful confrontation with Claire, are assumed by Larry himself. This shift in focus away from the literary figure underscores my view that transcendental enlightenment is post-literate.

(There is also a 1946 movie adaptation by Edmund Goulding that I could barely finish watching. Both movies did a disservice to the feminine sexuality of Claire, and to the implied homosexuality of the character Elliott. The 1946 movie did a worse job of it. It also cleansed Sophie, and in so doing killed her character more tragically than the story.)

See also: Lost scenes: “I want you to learn more about books.”

Being and time
Martin Heidegger; Harper & Row 1962
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Being and Time by Martin Heidegger is a pillar of post-modernist thought, an essential reference for understanding the philosophy of mind and technology. Reading it is no small undertaking. Ontology is an abstract subject, requiring prior reading in the philosophy of mind, and familiarization with the new language introduced by Heidegger. On the first day of my existentialism class in 1990, the prof wagged her wise old head over the reading list, intoning, “it’s a tough slog”, debating whether or not to inflict the book on us. She did. Reading Being and Time was my real initiation into the art of slow reading. I pored over the book page by page, making careful notes as I read. I made good progress but I confess I stopped after two hundred pages, less than halfway through the book. I did not finish the book, but neither did Heidegger. A third part and a second book were supposed to follow but instead Heidegger retired to the Black Woods. Ontology does that to people.

Understanding Heidegger is essential as technology plays an increasing role in our lives. I rounded out my understanding of Heidegger in later years. Some excellent essays may be found in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, edited by Charles Guignon. If you want to read a small introduction, I recommend Heidegger, an excellent 56-page summary by Jonathan Rée. What follows is my own summary of the main concepts.

Ready-to-hand. Before we can inquire about the being of things, we must take a look at the inquirer — people, you and me, who ask about these things. Prior to any kind of inquiry about anything, people are just going about doing what they are doing, busy using the things of the world, carrying on their business, like reading this article. You are immersed in a stream of experience. Heidegger calls this state, “ready-to-hand.”

Presence-at-hand. It is only when something is askew that we reflectively notice a thing, and begin the activity of inquiry. You’re reading this article, and you notice a word misspelled or a concept you disagree with. Your focus then moves in on the thing, and you begin to analyze it. You regard the object of your attention as a “thing” that can be objectified and theorized about. Heidegger calls this state, “presence-at-hand.”

Inauthenticity. There is a natural tendency to apply this same kind of theoretical approach to ourselves and others. Descartes took this tendency to the extreme, depicting people as entities isolated from the world, looking out upon it. By extension, others are entities, distinctly separated from our viewpoint. Heidegger calls this perspective the “they-self”, a distortion of ourselves and our relations with others and the world, leading to a preoccupation with gossip, entertainment, and other triviality that reinforces or advances our status relative to others, trying to secure the substantiveness of fragile selves. Heidegger calls this state, “inauthenticity”.

Dasein. Heidegger argues that we are not isolated entities, distinct from others and the world. He introduces the concept of “Dasein”. We are first existences in the world, doing our business, involved in activities. We have being in the world before we do any kind of theoretical inquiry. In contrast to Cartesian solipsism, he coins the word, “Dasein”. We are openings to the world, having access to phenomena. We are fundamentally linked to the stream of experience. We must have this link, or it makes no sense to inquire into the nature of phenomena. It would be impossible to say anything sensible at all about phenomena without first having some kind of qualitative relationship. We are Dasein, windows to others and the world. Dasein is always “thown” into some circumstance. Where it is thrown, it cares about what is going on, and it projects into the future its plans for dealing with its circumstances. Dasein is first a window to its experience, and then a theorizer, planning a way to handle its experience.

Time. The main cause of inauthenticity is our tendency to regard time as a series of “now-points”. We tend to regard birth and death as distant facts. We consider out lives a finite resource of discrete units of time which we must fill. Hence, we fashion an “I-point” (the Cartesian self) which is a certain quantity of “now-points”. We intend to fill our life with a certain quantity of experiences that will define who we are. In fact, death is an ever present reality. This fact causes us anxiety, but authentically, we cannot pretend that our self is defined apart from birth and death. Our being is not measured by the now-points we fill. Our authentic being is a constant incompleteness, at any time to be ended by death. (Heidegger sounds like a Buddhist.)

What does all this have to do with modern technology? Heidegger introduced the famous example of the broken hammer that stops a worker and causes reflection. It applies to all tools and technologies. What is to be done when the hammer or information technology breaks? We become unnerved as our 24/7 electric blanket of technology cools off. Without vigilance, our analyses become inauthentic, self-serving spirals of falsity, having nothing to do with the original need to hammer. We invent mighty technologies that seem pretty cool but belie our original purpose. Reflection must be grounded in Dasein’s open view on the stream of experience.

If you have read this far, you have the stamina for Being and Time, and you have also earned a bonus. Download audio lectures of “Philosophy 185 Heidegger” by Hubert Dreyfus, Berkely.