On Point Radio Show: The Reading Mind.

[capri0mni]

Hm. According to the website, this show was on a over a week ago. Doesn't feel like that long. I'm losing all sense of time.

Anyway, on this radio show: On Point: The Reading Mind, the invited expert guest, a neurobiologist, said that reading changes the brain, in ways that make reading people better and kinder and smarter than non-reading people, because of all the extra neural pathways the brain creates to decode visual letters into sounds into mental images. She came this close to saying that orally-based cultures were inferior, and couldn't have democracies or independent thinkers like literate cultures can.

As a lover of oralature, naturally, I have been stewing over this ever since (8 days, apparently). And now, the yeasty, bubbly mass of my thoughts is overflowing the breadbowl of my mind. So it's time to punch the thing down. I will do it with bullet points.

• She pointed out how the rise of Protestantism and democracies began to really flower in Europe with the invention of the printing press, and the ability of the common man to take his own Bible into his own corner and read it for himself, without relying on the learned priest to read it for him.
  
  • True, say I. But I also say that the priest's power was created by the alphabet, in the first place, by transforming the spoken language that anyone could understand into a special code that needs years of special training in order to decode. A member of the audience at an oral telling of a tale has always been free to think her or his own thoughts about a story, and to tell it to the next person down the street.

• She pointed out that schoolchildren who read well and often are empirically shown to be more empathetic with others than kids who don't read (all North-American Schoolkids, if I understood correctly). She attributes this to the decoding of letters in the reading brain, and transforming them into visual scenes of the characters, so that it feels like what we're reading in the story is actually happening to us.
  
  • Well, say I, the magical identification of the audience with a character in a story is all over the place in many oral cultures, particularly ancient Ireland and India. So that phenomenon can not be connected to reading alone.
    
    If she really wanted to test reading vs. non-reading, she'd study both reading and non-reading kids in a technilogical culture like ours with kids of the same age in purely (or nearly purely) oral cultures -- like the rain forests of the Amazon, or something. I mean, is it really the fact that they don't read that makes some kids more callous than others, or is it that they're getting stories about Britney Spears and Lindsey Lohan instead of Wind in the Willows and Horatio Hornblower (or their culture's creation and hero myths)?

Now, I look at the literacy much as I look at the technology of canning or dehydrating food. A canned tomato or dried peach can't hold a candle to fruit that is freshly picked and perfectly ripe, and still warm from the sun. And a story gotten from a book can't hold a candle to a story that is told by a living breathing human being right in front of you, who can subtly change the telling in response to your reactions, and in perfect rhythm with your moods in the moment. But like canning and drying, literacy has given us access to a wider "diet" of stories, from both different places and different times, that would otherwise be lost to us. So, on the whole, it's probably a healthy thing.

Oh, and in thinking about this, something occured to me: It may not be reading vs. non-reading, per se that creates the division between empathetic and callous, so much as it's reading vs. television and movies. You see, a living storyteller and a book do have one thing in common: if you walk away, or lose interest, the story stops being told (the storyteller is likely to say something like: "Oy! where you going? I'm not done yet!"). But that all changed with tv and movies. You could be kissing in the back row of the theater, or crying your eyes out with a broken heart because your lover just broke up with you via a text message, and the movie screen and the tv screen will keep blathering on, and not care a whit, or hand you a tissue, or anything (I'm reminded of people who go to live theater and talk to their neighbors, or open noisy packets of food, and not realise that the actors on stage can actually hear them). And for most kids who don't read, that becomes their social model.

Both reading and listening to a live story require active engagement from the audience to work, and it's my hunch that that's what leads to empathy more than the decoding of little letter shapes.

Comments

[spiralsheep.livejournal.com]

Excellent post. I have nothing to add because you've said it all.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

Thank you.

Reading really is wonderful (if you're reading good writing), but nothing can compare to a good live telling. There's one rendition of Rapunzel, I heard about sixteen years ago, that just about ripped my heart out and handed it back to me on a platter..

Storytellers: they're not just for little kids anymore.

[capriuni.livejournal.com]

And of course, right when I have the greatest urge to make a storyteller icon, is right whem my mouse is borked...