“Biologically and intellectually, reading allows the species to go “beyond the information given” to create endless thoughts most beautiful and wonderful.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
“The end of reading development doesn’t exist; the unending story of reading moves ever forward, leaving the eye, the tongue, the word, the author for a new place from which the “truth breaks forth, fresh and green,” changing the brain and the reader every time.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
“inflexible muteness of written words doomed the dialogic process Socrates saw as the heart of education.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
“WE WERE NEVER BORN TO READ. HUMAN BEINGS invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged 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.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
“There are few more powerful mirrors of the human brain's astonishing ability to rearrange itself to learn a new intellectual function than the act of reading. Underlying the brain's ability to learn reading lies its protean capacity to make new connections among structures and circuits originally devoted to other more basic brain processes that have enjoyed a longer existence in human evolution, such as vision and spoken language. [...] we come into the world programmed with the capacity to change what is given to us by nature, so that we can go beyond it. We are, it would seem from the start, genetically poised for breakthroughs.”
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
― Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain
Allen’s 2025 Year in Books
Take a look at Allen’s Year in Books, including some fun facts about their reading.
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