The Science of Reading by Adrian Johns

The Science of Reading: Information, Media & Mind in Modern America
By Adrian Johns
University of Chicago Press 2023

The Science of Reading, a big, pleasingly dense book by University of Chicago history professor Adrian Johns, mentions earlier tomes on the subject, as a way of indicating the progress of the subject. “Not only has the experimental science of reading – eye cameras, tachistoscopes, and all – survived into the twenty-first century; it has also flourished, diversified, and even undergone its own version of democratization,” Johns writes. “One can get an impression of its continuing importance simply by hefting in one’s hand either of two so-called handbooks to survey the field recently: Blackwell’s The Science of Reading (2005), which weighs in at 661 pages, or The Oxford Handbook of Eye Movements (2011), which at 1,027 pages is almost twice as long.” 

(Readers can assume that “Blackwell’s Science of Reading” is the one edited by Margaret Snowling and her husband Charles Hulme, but assuming is all they’ll be able to do, since this 2023 Science of Reading inexcusably includes no bibliography)

The existence of these and many other books on the subject of reading is hardly surprising, since reading is the most ubiquitous miracle in the world (Edmund Burke Huey is quoted in these pages as calling it “one of the most mysterious of the arts”). As Johns points out, too much reading can noodle the brain, whereas poor reading can cause arguments and split friendships. “Not only were the mechanisms of reading still unclear,” he writes of the study of the whole process, “but the same habit was apparently both so powerful that it could drive people to madness and, mutatis mutandis, so malleable that two different readers could respond quite differently to the same text. What was this practice, anyway – how did one acquire it, practice it skillfully, and master its effects?” 

“What was this practice, anyway?” – The Science of Reading takes up this question on both historical and scientific grounds. Readers meet modern pioneers in the science of reading, figures from the aforementioned Huey to, for instance, to the founder of the science, Émile Javal, to Samuel T. Orton, who did early clarifying work in the nature and prevalence of dyslexia while examining students from his positions at the University of Iowa at the beginning of the 20th century. Johns is surprisingly skilled at fleshing out this large cast of characters. His subject is inherently interesting right from the starting block, but these character-driven portions are a delightful added bonus.

The scientific grounds make for heavier rowing and a stranger reading experience, since many of the aforementioned eye camera and tachistoscope exercises involve measuring how the human eye moves around the printed page – which is not only something most readers think about but something that leads to one oddly unsettling image after another of eyes blankly staring out of the page at the reader (it starts on the cover). The sheer interest of studying at this in-depth a level something that all readers do without thinking animates The Science of Reading throughout. It’s likely that most of those readers might not be inclined to pull back the curtain quite so far on the magic that fills their leisure hours – but the die-hard inquirers among them will find this book irresistible.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.