And, in Proust and the Squid, Maryanne Wolf explains that reading, unlike speech and vision, is not genetically programmed and therefore must be learned by each individual, and that this learning process creates in the brain distinctive connections, which depend on the language used. Doctors treating a stroke victim bilingual in English and Chinese found that, as a consequence of specific brain damage, the patient could no longer read English but could still read Chinese. So, in a real, even physical, sense, ‘we are what we read’. And, when children are learning to read, major areas of both brain hemispheres are involved but, as reading skill improves, activity is mostly concentrated in a small area of the left hemisphere, though the right may be activated anywhere in unpredictable ways. In other words, the left hemisphere develops a dedicated reading function and the more parallel right hemisphere, which produces insights, is set free to speculate and associate, to romp and gambol like the mind of God. ‘The secret at the heart of reading,’ Wolf concludes, is ‘the time it frees for the brain to have thoughts deeper than those which came before’. And the problem with skimming is that it loses this ‘associative dimension’, ‘the profound generativity of the reading brain’. (Michael Foley, 2010, Chap 9)
Now, 有趣的是，有沒有所謂 Writing Brain，
