By taking this meta-view of the entire history, we can see that what promotes the development of intellectual thought in human history is not the first alphabet or even the best iteration of an alphabet but writing itself. As the twentieth-century Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky said, the act of putting spoken words and unspoken thoughts into written words releases and, in the process, changes the thoughts themselves. As humans learned to use written language more and more precisely to convey their thoughts, their capacity for abstract thoughts and novel ideas accelerated.

maryanne wolf

Wolf, M. (2008). Proust and the squid. Faber & faber.