Brain talk

Language -- the transmission of meaning through a specialized system of symbols -- is the general topic of three very different and engaging new books about the brain at work.

Think of this threesome in strata; intellectual layers. At the deepest depths of academic scholarship is Harvard University Prof. Steven Pinker's "The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature" (Viking, $29.95). Above the Pinker strata, though still plenty scholarly, sits Tufts University Prof. Maryanne Wolf's "Proust and the Squid" (HarperCollins, $29.95). Atop "Squid" sits the lithely told history of sign language embedded in a story about a linguistic field report, "Talking Hands" (Simon and Schuster, $27.99) by New York Times reporter Margalit Fox.

'Talking Hands'

Trained in linguistics, Fox combines her academic work and reporter's story sense nicely to produce a tightly organized, easy read that tells two stories at once, in alternating chapters.

The odd-numbered chapters are really a travelogue posing as a linguistic field trip. The journey involves the remote Bedouin village of Al-Sayyid in Israel that has experienced an unusually high rate of deafness -- 150 of its 3,500 residents are deaf. Because deafness is commonplace here, Al-Sayyid's residents are believed to have spontaneously evolved their own original signing language. Proving this is the book's plot challenge. Over three days in 2003, Fox joined a team of four linguistic researchers as they set out to observe, videotape and collect evidence of this communication system with structural relationships, rules and all the other hallmarks of language -- vs. merely a collection of gestures.

In these travelogue chapters, Fox describes -- too much, for my taste -- what it's like to be amid the Bedouins and in their desert houses, awash in children furtively darting, like fish under a dock, to glimpse the laptop-toting strangers. It is the even-numbered chapters that really engage and inform the reader. They place the field trip solidly in the historical and scientific reconstructions of the development of sign languages in the United States and around the world, analysis of sign language grammar and the psychology of signing.

The book contains bibliographic references, but is neither illustrated nor footnoted. Line drawings would help prime non-signing readers' visual processing for imagining a spatially rendered language. But once you orient your brain to use space and shapes instead of sound to communicate, you will find yourself marveling at the miracle of creating and communicating meaning.

'Proust and the Squid'

This is a book about the science of how the brain reads, written by a child-development expert who directs the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Boston. It is intelligent and detailed -- casual readers might find it demandingly so. But trust Wolf. Her conversational style, reflective comments and insights from work with children and parents struggling with dyslexia help create a narrative flow and bright tone.

Best of all, this book has 28 excellent scientific line drawings to provide visual explanations for difficult concepts, such as "Fig. 6-2, Fluent Comprehending Brain (Dorsal and Ventral Routes)." Don't worry. You'll get it if you read three paragraphs and look at the picture. It explains something we all know: differences in learning time, slow vs. fast.

Wolf begins with the historical and biological accounts of cognitive changes that occurred in the brain over approximately 2,000 years to enable our species to read. She then moves to address the cultural and educational implications of this breakthrough -- or failure of it, as in cases of reading disorders such as dyslexia.

The book's title invokes French novelist Marcel Proust's observation that reading offers sanctuary: an open preserve of transforming realities. Coupling Proust with squid is a declaration of the book's scientific intent. Certain scientists and medical historians recognize the squid as a mainstay of early research into the nature of nerve transmission.

Underlying this rich scientific account is a cultural story that we all need ponder. What are the biological implications of the transition to a culture increasingly oriented to a torrent of imagery from digital media? How does this remodel our brains' neuronal connections and processing pathways? What does this mean for our children's reading brains?

For it is children whose developing brains are most deeply and frequently immersed in the digital world of urgent images and sounds. How, amid the visual tumult and ceaseless podflow, might they find -- and value -- Proustian sanctuary?

'The Stuff of Thought'

In Pinker's latest exploration of how language and mind work, he examines what the language of the mind tells us about human nature, using examples and analysis of topics as seemingly unrelated as the $3.5 billion legal dispute over the semantics of the Sept. 11 bombings, how young children learn verbs, space, time.

And swearing.

In the chapter "The Seven Words You Can't Say on Television," Pinker asks: "Why would a democracy sanction the use of government force to deter the uttering of words for two activities -- sex and excretion --that harm no one and are inescapable parts of the human condition?"

Readers familiar with Pinker will correctly guess that the answers he offers are clearly written, often fun to read -- and sometimes dizzying from the sheer density of data he consistently marshals and nimbly integrates. Just when you're about to fishtail over the glaze of his tight presentations, you thump up against a subtitle like this: "Pottymouths."As with the rest of language, swearing can be called universal, though only with qualifications," Pinker writes.

He follows this with engaging examples of dirty words that once were clean, and clean words now dirty. He moves easily from Shakespeare to Lenny Bruce, ancient medical texts to George Carlin.

Pinker is fascinating, authoritative, intense. His book is packed with ideas that have been fully thought out and carefully rendered to prompt us each to marvel at the determinants of human nature, and how we use mind and language to communicate our essential selves.

Anne Brataas is president and founder of the Story Laboratory, a St. Paul science communications and curriculum development company, and a graduate student in the history of medicine, science and technology at the University of Minnesota.