Archive for July, 2010
Reading, writing and evolution
Reading and writing: do they go together like love and marriage? Well, it turns out the story is complicated. Take Howard Engel, a novelist who wrote to Dr. Sacks a few years ago. He had a stroke that suddenly destroyed, with almost surgical precision, his ability to read.
Uncannily, the stroke did not affect Howard’s ability to write at all. And (as Dr. Sacks’s subjects often do) he came up with a remarkable strategy to continue as a novelist, despite being unable to read what he has just written.
You may have seen Dr. Sacks’s essay about Howard in the New Yorker a few weeks ago, but if you missed it, fear not: the unabridged version is included in The Mind’s Eye. You can also read a little bit in July’s Footnote of the Month.
The center in our brain for understanding and producing language is uniquely human, having evolved some hundreds of thousands of years ago. But how is it that reading, a cultural invention only a few thousand years old, also has a dedicated center in the brain? If evolution didn’t put it there, what did?
We won’t give it all away here, but the answer involves a lot of your favorite characters and ideas, including Darwin and Wallace, Borges and Japanese poetry, the colorblind painter, hyperlexia, musical alexia, the evolution of alphabets, and, of course, amazingly adaptable brains.
Footnote of the Month: July 2010
People with alexia can see perfectly well, but their brains lose the ability to decipher words and letters. Howard Engel, the Canadian novelist known for his Benny Cooperman series of detective novels, put it this way:
The July 31, 2001, Globe and Mail looked the way it always did in its make-up, pictures, assorted headlines and smaller captions. The only difference was that I could no longer read what they said. The letters, I could tell, were the familiar twenty-six I had grown up with. Only now, when I brought them into focus, they looked like Cyrillic one moment and Korean the next. Was this a Serbo-Croatian version of the Globe, made for export? . . . Was I the victim of a practical joke? . . . I have friends who are capable of such things. . . . I wondered what I might do to them that would improve on this piece of foolery. Then, I considered the alternative possibility. I checked the Globe’s inside pages . . . I checked the want ads and the comics. I couldn’t read them either. . . .
Panic should have hit me like the proverbial ton of bricks. But instead I was suffused with a reasonable, business-as-usual calm. “Since this isn’t somebody’s idea of a joke, then, it follows, I have suffered a stroke.”
from The Mind’s Eye, chapter 3.