All writers read, of course. I’ve always assumed that they read often, steadily, efficiently, and with pleasure. But on reflection, I wonder. Is it necessarily the case? Do they read more, or differently from people who are not writers, perhaps more eclectically, or quickly or thoroughly? \u00a0Is there a “price,” in terms of general economy of resources, e.g. time and energy. Does reading draw on a given person’s resources lightly or heavily compared with, say, speaking and listening, not to mention the rest of life?<\/p>\n
I’m currently reading a book about what happens in the brain of a person who is reading.\u00a0 It seems miraculous.\u00a0 A complex chain of events begins with the visual recognition of curves and lines of letters.\u00a0 It associates these with parts of words, then words, then meaning — widely dispersed, often in memory — or it makes associations with sounds and the musculature to produce them. Or both. All this happens in a fraction of second.<\/p>\n
The author of this book, Stanislaus Dehaene (Reading in the Brain), marvels along with his readers: how could the visual cortex of a large primate have evolved in such a way as to be able to learn such fine coordination between vision, hearing, speech centres, and memory?\u00a0 And these days, when it seems fewer and fewer people are reading at all and those who are, overall, are reading less than they did once, should we think of reading as a triumph of the specie, or as sort of an anomaly, like an infection (Dehaene’s suggestion) that has spread among us? Perhaps we’re past the pinnacle of its “hold” on us.<\/p>\n
Many factors impinge on anyone’s learning to read — inherited disposition, family and peers, rewards; many more affect one’s contemporary choices. Is listening and \u00a0watching “easier,” more fun, more efficient? I feel fairly sure that every reader has a particular, unique relationship to written text, a pattern of decisions about what to read, a characteristic speed, a quotient of pleasure or pain, a set of expectations.\u00a0 A writer, surely, has a uniquely serious \u00a0commitment to this relationship. \u00a0Looking ahead to a future with fewer, less committed readers, and perhaps more importantly with machines that claim to write on our behalf<\/em>, I hope contemporary writers cherish and nurture their uniqueness, their particularity, their humanity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" All writers read, of course. I’ve always assumed that they read often, steadily, efficiently, and with pleasure. But on reflection, I wonder. Is it necessarily the case? Do they read more, or differently from...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":2826,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"bgseo_title":"Rethinking what Writers Read: symptoms of unique identity","bgseo_description":"At a moment when neuroscientists brains as they read, rethinking what and how we read becomes a way to diagnose personality, especially for writers. ","bgseo_robots_index":"index","bgseo_robots_follow":"follow","_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2825","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-art"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2825"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2832,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2825\/revisions\/2832"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2826"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2825"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2825"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nancyannroth.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2825"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}