Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain (Maryanne Wolf)

Reading - the greatest technology

Fascinating explanation of the way that human brains have not only evolved the capacity to create mental simulations based on anything "imaginable", but, just as importantly, to add these to the memory store of "experiences" that then inform future action.

Wolf's main focus then moves to the power of the written word to share these simulations with others - in effect sharing the imaginative capacity of the species across time and space.

The book then moves into highly specific (and thoroughly referenced) discussion of reading function and pathology.

The rather intriguing title is explained in the following excerpt:

In this book I use the celebrated French novelist Marcel Proust as metaphor and the largely under appreciated squid as analogy for two very different aspects of reading.  
Proust saw reading as a kind of intellectual "sanctuary", where human beings have access to thousands of different realities they might never encounter or understand otherwise.  Each of these new realities is capable of transforming reader' intellectual lives without ever requiring them to leave the comfort of their armchairs.
Scientists in the 1950's used the long central axon of the shy but cunning squid to understand how neurons fire and transmit to each other, and in some cases to see how neurons repair and compensate when something goes awry.  
At a different level of study, cognitive neuro-scientists today investigate how various cognitive (or mental) processes work in the brain.
The study of what the human brain has to do to read, and of its clever ways of adapting when things go wrong, is analogous to the study of the squid in earlier neuroscience.

Interestingly she does not reference Alain de Botton's "How Proust Can Change Your Life" (1998).