DNA Excerpt: Reading in Our Genes

by Dr. Hsien-Hsien Lei
Posted January 18, 2008 in DNA Quotes and Excerpts

From Twilight of the Books by Caleb Crain in The New Yorker:

Taking the long view, it’s not the neglect of reading that has to be explained but the fact that we read at all. “The act of reading is not natural,” Maryanne Wolf writes in “Proust and the Squid” (Harper; $25.95), an account of the history and biology of reading. Humans started reading far too recently for any of our genes to code for it specifically. We can do it only because the brain’s plasticity enables the repurposing of circuitry that originally evolved for other tasks—distinguishing at a glance a garter snake from a haricot vert, say.

Tags: reading, genetics, genes, dna, books

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