After my last diatribe about the nonfictitious world we are thrust into in order to survive, and how to escape it means I reach for fiction or poetry as a kind of reprieve, I stumble across a nonfiction book that has caught my eye. It’s called Proust and the Squid: The Story and the Science Behind the Reading Brain, written by Maryanne Wolf. Here’s the opening that fascinated me so:
 
We were never born to read. Human beings invented reading only a few thousand years ago. And with this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the way we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of the species.

Maryanne Wolf, by the way, is a cognitive neuroscientist professor at Tuft’s University and a childhood development expert. So, my being drawn to this stems from my own recent experiences with teaching my 4 year-old how to read. But also, it reminds me of the book I’m teaching this semester, Fahrenheit 451. If our brains evolved due to the invention of reading, how will future brains evolve and function after generations of technological bombardment? Will the passive ease with which we experience advancements of the television, computer, video games, and iPods slowly diminish our abilities to read, altering our brains again, turning us into technologically savvy cavepeople?