Searching for the Beginning of Time and Other Short Stories from Science, History and Philosophy by Saso Dolenc

Author:Saso Dolenc
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: General Nonfiction
ISBN: 9789619254561
Publisher: Kvarkadabra
Published: 2011-08-18T04:00:00+00:00

Why people are exceptional readers

Reading and writing relatively recent inventions, no more than some thousands of years’ old, and are much younger still in some parts of the world. People can read and write with ease and it seems almost by instinct, using the same eyes and brains as our ancient illiterate ancestors. Reading is not, however, an evolutionary feature of the human brain: if it was, then prehistoric Homo sapiens would also have been able to read. The fact that modern people are such good readers thus presents something of a mystery.

When reading, we are not actually aware of individual letters, because written words and sentences are automatically transformed into mental images. When we read a well written novel, we are completely immersed in the story and events take place before our eyes as if watching a movie. Of course, another important factor that makes a good book is the flow of words which create the atmosphere. However, it is essential that this is achieved spontaneously, without any forced conscious effort. As readers, we often do not realize that our eyes are merely registering a sequence of signs which is then simultaneously translated into meaning by our brain. It seems as if the writer were whispering in our ear.

Humans started communicating gradually via speech, through evolution, which means we are biologically conditioned to speak, but this does not apply to reading and writing. In his latest book, The Vision Revolution: How the Latest Research Overturns Everything We Thought We Knew about Human Vision (Benbella Books, 2009), Mark Changizi, an American scientist, discusses the paradox of reading in the history of human adaptation.

Children’s drawings, the origins of writing

In the middle of the 20th century, child psychology researcher Rhoda Kellogg discovered that little children of the same age and from different cultures and parts of the world made similar drawings. The goal of human evolution was not to draw well, so according to Changizi what these findings imply above all is that children have a universal approach to learning to communicate to the best of their abilities, using a pen and a sheet of paper. When drawing, children are creating signs they believe to be visual images symbolizing individual objects in their surroundings.

The key word to bear in mind here is “symbolizing”: the child in his or her drawing produces an image which “stands for” something they have encountered (or imagined), not one which aims at describing or representing that entity perfectly. As one might expect, children’s drawings from different parts of the world are not completely alike, even when they are pictures of such common favorites as cats or dogs. An element of style is already important: the same variant, in fact, which one observes between art from different cultures.

The key feature which all children’s drawings have in common is that they are above all symbols and not attempts at actual reproductions of real-life subjects. As such, children’s drawings represent an effort to write down stories using graphic symbols. They

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