Reviews for Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain

The average rating for Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-05-08 00:00:00 David Puma If you're into stuff like this, you can read the full review. Bone-in Meat Without the Meat: "Proust and the Squid" by Maryanne Wolf "Will the split-second immediacy of information gained from a search engine and the sheer volume of what is available derail the slower, more deliberative processes that deepen our understanding of complex concepts, of another's inner thought processes, and of our own consciousness?"   In "Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf"     Why wouldn't Amazon publish the ebook I wrote in 1986 on a ZX81 and posted to them saved on a cassette tape? On the other hand, I once (1988, I think) did the work for a non-linear dynamics paper on my Sinclair Spectrum, and produced the diagrams using the Spectrum's printer, which used sparks to burn dots in the silver coating of the paper, then photographing and enlarging them. It was submitted to the very snooty college journal. They accepted it but wondered if I couldn't make better diagrams. They published anyway when I said I couldn't. How I wish I could recover this. It's in one of the floppy disk in my attic at home…I've still got several programming nuggets I developed at the time. One of them was a chess compiler in C. If I had the hardware to read that kind of media (I've still got the floppy disks, but I no longer have the drive that went along with them…), I could recover most of them too if I really set my mind to it. But I wouldn't regard it as worth the effort, so they'll eventually get lost without anyone ever knowing whether they are worth saving. Only me…A lot of forensics software aims to keep old formats readable - so incompatibility is the least of our worries. Books last for hundreds, even thousands of years. Modern storage media do not. 'Bit rot' is going to become a serious problem...       If you're into Proust and Programming Languages, read on.

Review # 2 was written on 2015-02-23 00:00:00 David Luck This is a book I frequently return to, checking facts, and reminding myself what a wondrous thing reading actually is. Maryanne Wolf masters the difficult balance between an enjoyable book full of anecdotes and a sound scientific research on the processes of the brain while reading. I was fascinated by the several pages long description of what happens in my head while I read just ONE SENTENCE. After I had finished the description, I went back and reread the section (it took about 20 minutes), and again, could not quite visualise how my brain could do all that while I was just trying to make sense of the content. Woolf explains the difference between deeply concentrated reading and skimming through articles (online), and she gives a detailed account of dyslexia, from a very personal perspective. I finished the book with a satisfying feeling of knowing more and yet wanting to learn so much still. Very readable!