Category: Literacy

Reading as hunger, vision, and the path to knowledge

Seekers

Every reader carries a different hunger to the page. Some skim quickly for ideas, others linger and savour every word. Some want escape, others want information, still others a spark of recognition. There are solitary readers and social ones, rereaders who return to favourites, and seekers who are always searching for something new.

Seekers read with curiosity as their compass. They are less loyal to authors or genres than to the promise of discovery. For them, every book is a trailhead, and they rarely take the same path twice. Their shelves are eclectic—science beside poetry, memoir beside myth—because what matters is the taste of the unfamiliar, the chance to glimpse another landscape of thought.

Seekers are restless. They may abandon a book halfway, not out of disrespect but because they’ve already found the morsel they needed. They often read in clusters, chasing a theme across disciplines or following a footnote into another book. Unlike collectors, they aren’t after completeness; unlike devotees, they aren’t bound by loyalty. What drives them is the thrill of orientation in unknown terrain, the small exhilaration of not knowing what they will find.

Glimmers

The glimmer is what keeps the seeker reading: the sudden flash when a sentence, an image, or even a stray aside illuminates something inside them. It might not be the author’s main point, but a shard of insight that shines like mica in a streambed. Seekers read loosely, scanning for brightness rather than mapping the whole terrain.

A glimmer doesn’t demand completion. A novel may be abandoned after one striking description; a dense theory text after a single idea that reframes the world. To outsiders this looks like impatience, but for seekers it is economy. Why pan the whole river once you’ve found gold?

Glimmers also accumulate. One may be small—a metaphor in a line of dialogue. Another may be large—a concept that reshapes how one thinks about time, memory, or love. Together they form a constellation, not a linear argument but a scattered pattern of lights guiding the seeker forward.

In this sense, the glimmer is not just discovery but connection. It resonates with something in the reader, affirming that reading is not mere consumption but a dialogue between mind and text.

Existential Depth

There is existential depth to these glimmers. At their strongest they feel like recognition, a sudden clearing in the thicket of words where something essential shows itself. They arrive not as arguments but as presences. A fragment of poetry may strike like déjà vu, as if it remembered us rather than the other way around. A philosophical aside may feel less like learning than recalling what we already half-knew but could not articulate. In such moments, the book seems to read the reader.

For seekers, glimmers often point toward the ungraspable—mortality, freedom, the mystery of consciousness, the sheer strangeness of being alive. That is why they do not mind leaving books unfinished: the goal was never the book itself but the window it opened. Glimmers remind us that meaning is not under our control. It appears unexpectedly, as a gift.

Shamanic Reading

The seeker’s pursuit of glimmers has something shaman-like about it. Not ritual or trance, but movement between worlds. Reading becomes a passage into another realm, the text, where the seeker searches for signs and sparks of insight hidden in unfamiliar terrain.

The glimmer is like a vision. It cannot be summoned; it arrives luminous, often in the margins. When it does, it feels like a message from “the other side”—the unconscious, the author’s imagination, or the shared well of human experience.

The seeker, like a shaman, returns changed. They may carry back a fragment—a phrase, an image, a half-formed thought—that works on them like a charm. These fragments are portable revelations. They don’t explain the world but re-enchant it, reminding us that meaning lives in flashes, not systems. And seekers are willing to get lost. They don’t fear disorientation, knowing that only by wandering can they be open to visitation.

The Summit of Knowledge

Books are not just companions on the journey—they are the path itself, cut through the wilderness of ignorance by countless others before us. No individual could reconstruct the discoveries of medicine, mathematics, philosophy, or art alone. Through books, we inherit them.

Reading is a species-level augmentation. A fragile, short-lived creature can stand at the summit of human knowledge because others left their traces in words. To open a book is to walk into the company of the dead and the living, to borrow their vision for a moment.

For seekers, this makes the glimmer more profound. It is not only a private flash but the recognition of standing in a line of seekers stretching back centuries. Each glimmer is transmission: a spark passed hand to hand, book to book, mind to mind.

The existential depth is doubled. On the personal level, a glimmer pierces the fabric of daily life. On the species level, it reveals that we are never thinking alone. Each reader is a node in humanity’s ongoing conversation, granted access to the farthest edge of what we know, and perhaps even to the hint of what comes next.

Books for Seekers

Some books seem written for seekers, scattering glimmers like breadcrumbs and resisting neat closure. A few landmarks:

David Abram, The Spell of the Sensuous. An exploration of perception, language, and ecology that invites us to sense the world as if for the first time.

Jorge Luis Borges, Labyrinths. The patron saint of seekers. His stories and essays are miniature labyrinths of mirrors, infinite libraries, and philosophical puzzles, each page a spark.

Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. A naturalist’s observations that become a metaphysical quest, ranging from creek bed to cosmos in search of meaning.

Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost. A modern classic that elevates disorientation itself into a method of discovery.

These are not books to be read straight through once, but to be dipped into, revisited, abandoned, and returned to—perfect terrain for those who seek the glimmer rather than the map.

Hungry for More

Seekers read to feed a hunger that never quite goes away, a hunger not for answers but for flashes of meaning. Each glimmer is a morsel, enough to nourish the spirit for a while, yet always leaving room for the next encounter. Books make this banquet possible, passing fragments of vision from one generation to the next. And so the path remains open, lit by sparks left behind for us to find.

What books have offered you glimmers along the way? Fellow seekers are always eager for new titles to add to the trail.

Each Generation Must Go Through the Hard Work of Learning to Read

Early into Reading in the Brain I knew I had found a very good book. It is packed with research and informed insight. As I continued to read it, however, I noticed something odd. I was struggling with the e-book edition I had purchased. I found myself wanting to physically grapple with the device more than the buttons would allow. The book contains diagrams that are useful to consult when reading the text, but I could not easily cross-reference them. The book is lengthy, and I found it difficult to track progress without the thickness of a print book. I had already enjoyed a few novels on my e-reader without this problem. This material was more challenging. I have read many similar scientific books before but always in print. For analytical reading the absence of tangible pages felt like a phantom pain. What was happening? Dehaene’s book was compelling enough, and the digital challenge troublesome enough, to merit a second purchase of the more expensive print edition. The completed reading answered my question.

The Reading Paradox

Dehaene begins with the reading paradox. Our brains evolved over millions of years without writing. How is it that we can read? The hardware of our brains has not evolved in the mere 5000-year history of writing. New studies repeatedly show that the brain is more plastic that we thought but no so plastic as to invent new structures for reading. Dehaene explains that reading became possible for humans because we had the good fortune to inherit cortical areas that could link visual elements to speech sounds and meanings. Our limited plasticity allowed us to recycle existing brain circuitry.

Learning to read still takes years of training. It starts with visual recognition of shapes, e.g., “T” and “L”. The brain learns to detect subtle differences in words, e.g., “eight” vs “sight” while ignoring big ones, e.g., “eight” vs “EIGHT”. We do not scan words letter by letter from left to right like a computer program, but instead encode units of meaning for easy look-up, e.g., the morpheme, “button” in “unbuttoning”. The brain uses two pathways in parallel, sound and meaning, to reconstruct the pronunciation of the word. With sufficient training and practice reading seems virtually effortless.

We are not born to read. The only evolution that occurred was cultural – we optimized reading over the centuries to suit the brain. One more thing is needed. Why are cultural phenomena like reading so uniquely developed in humans? Dehaene attributes it the evolution of our prefrontal cortex. “My proposal is that this evolution results in a large-scale ‘neuronal workspace’ whose main function is to assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge.” The workspace allowed us to exploit the cognitive niche made possible by neuronal recycling.

My Brain Needs Re-training for Reflective Reading of E-books

I was struck by the tight coupling of brain structures with their physical counterparts in the world. Learning to read, the brain becomes encoded with the specific shapes and sounds of words. The aim of reading is still to reconstruct the original physical speech utterances. The skills required for processing text should be mostly transferable from print to digital books. After all, the text is still there. Indeed, I find the reading of light or familiar material to be nearly equivalent on an e-reader.

When words are less familiar some slowness is to be expected. As Dehaene explains, we perform extra processing to decipher letters for rare or novel words before attempting to access their meaning. When words, sentences and paragraphs combine to express complex ideas much more processing is required. Reduced reading speed can be expected for reading abstract and challenging material regardless of the medium. To be sure, I wrestle with print books, snapping pages when I am unconvinced, wearing the binding from too much turning, attacking the text with a pen. I experienced this with the print edition of Reading in the Brain. I experienced a greater challenge when using the e-reader. How come?

I speculate a connection between reading technology and access to the neuronal workspace. Dehaene argues that literacy changed to suit the structures of the brain. The print book, the codex, is two thousand years old, a design that surpassed the scroll. It is an evolution of technology, finely tuned to our neurons to optimize reading. I can compel its knowledge. We assume the e-reader represents an advance on print because it embodies digital technology. Integrated with the web, it is easier to discover, purchase, search and link to other material. The text is readily ported to an e-reader and I can adjust its font-size for readability or play it aloud for listening. However, the mental struggle with a complex text suggests the e-reader is inferior for global analysis functions, the most obvious differences being parallel access to pages, easy turning and cross-referencing across any two points. These are reflective reading functions that are used to “assemble, confront, recombine, and synthesize knowledge,” the functions served by the neuronal workspace. If you think I am cutting too fine a point, recall the tight coupling between brain structures and the world.

I am certain that my brain is already being reprogrammed to work more efficiently with e-books. It is happening to all readers. This phase of re-training explains some of the fourty-year delay in the popular adoption of e-books. If my speculation is correct, e-reader design must evolve again if it is to compete equally with the print book for complex texts. What would an advanced digital e-reader look like? I offer a suggestion. The print book has facing pages, a feature that serves forward and back-referencing. Attempts have been made at a dual pane e-reader, but the feature could be amplified digitally using multiple tabs like modern browsers, available at once for parallel processing, still bound within the reading device.

Reading is Always at Risk

Dehaene’s book focuses my attention on two serious concerns. First, we are not born to read. The alphabet and literacy are cultural inventions finely tuned to our brains. Each generation must go through the hard work of learning to read. The internet does not offer a shortcut to knowledge. Second, the invention of reading re-purposed existing neural circuitry. Dehaene suggests the mental “letterbox” we use for recognizing letters may have once been used for identifying animal tracks, a skill we have lost. Cortical reorganization is a competition, a zero-sum game. As we re-train our brains for digital technology what skills will be lost? The capacity for long-form reflective reading, perhaps. Reading is always at risk.

Stroke, Alexia, and the Rewiring of the Reading Brain

They hook you early, the pushers, even in preschool. Maybe some of us are more susceptible than others. It is a fierce addiction, reading, and from there it is a slippery slope to writing.

Howard Engel was hooked young. Blame his parents; they read in the house. Soon he was choosing his own library books and writing puppet shows. He was rarely seen without two or more books on hand. As an adult, he wrote for radio before publishing a dozen detective novels. He was an addict of the printed word when he forgot how to read.

The Man Who Forgot How to Read is Engel’s memoir of the stroke that robbed him of his ability to read. Alexia without agraphia is a rare condition in which a person retains the ability to write but loses the ability to read. A frustrating condition indeed. Engel could write, but he could not read what he had just written. A stroke cuts into memory, threatening one’s sense of self, but Engel’s identity was rooted in reading: “I was still a reader. The blast to my brain could not make me otherwise. Reading was hard-wired into me. I could no more stop reading than I could stop my heart. Reading was bone and marrow, lymph and blood to me.” (p. 41)

Step by step, with the help of skilled therapists and devoted family and friends, Engel learned to read from the beginning again. Once his reading skills returned, the writing came naturally: first another detective novel, in which his protagonist suffers a blow to the head, and then this memoir. Engel’s refusal to accept the status of a “former reader,” and his triumph over stroke and brain injury, should be a siren call to those who have not yet discovered a passion for reading. Unlike other addictions, the reading habit may take some effort to acquire, but it rewards its devotees with a lifetime of pleasure and never a moment’s regret.

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