Book completed

Proust and the Squid: The Story and the Science of the Reading Brain, by Maryanne Wolf. Very interesting. The first third is on the development of writing systems (exactly the sort of thing my mom loved to read about). The second third is about learning to read - the author invites us to skim the section on neuroscience, but I did wade through it. The final third is insights from her own career as an expert in dyslexia.

As it turns out, there are two main pathways to dyslexia. One is having a difficult time understanding words as made up of specific sounds that recur in other words. The other is having a time delay between seeing letters (and colors, etc.) and being able to name them. It turns out that at least the time precision part is normally governed by the left side of the brain, whereas dyslexics end up reading with the right side of the brain, possibly because they're already more gifted in using the right side, or else their brain just happens to read that way, strengthening the right side and enhancing its other gifts. With different languages, there are different prevalent patterns in dyslexia - in English, many have the first problem, many have the second, quite a few (maybe it was the majority?) have both, but about 10% have neither.

Day 1002: J's birthday party

For J's birthday, he had three friends over (D, DG, and JC) to play a complicated and extra-social version of Magic that he invented. D was the eventual winner, as he had been the last time these three played that format. Then at 4:30, JC's wife and daughter arrived and I socialized a bunch with them - the daughter is 19 months old and quite entertaining. We had lemon cake, and then the guests left, and J's been napping for at least three hours. He just woke up enough to tell me that all he'd ingested today was some blackberry cider, three slices of lemon cake, and a bunch of milk, hence the napping.

Here's a picture he took of Azalyn, who was watching them through the sliding glass door: