Hum lecture was intense today

The lecturer was talking about oral traditions and the differences between literate and strictly oral cultures. A theme that recurred in the discussion was the idea that literacy encourages greater abstraction and oral tradition tends toward more concrete associations. In the notes she quoted this rather long passage which I will put in small text:

Anne Carson, Eros, the Bittersweet (Princton: Princton University Press, 1986), p. 43:

"An individual who lives an an oral culture uses his senses differently than one who lives in a literate culture, and with that different sensual deployment comes a different way of conceiving his own relations with his environment, a different conception of his body and a different conception of his self. The difference revolves around the physiological and psychological phenomenon of individual self-control. Self-control is minimally stressed in an oral milieu where most of the data important for survival and understanding are channeled into the individual through the open conduits of his senses, particularly his sense of sound... A continuous fluent interchange of sensual impressions and responses between the enivronment and himself is the proper condition of his mental and physical life. To close his senses off from the outside world would be counterproductive to life and to thought.

[...] As an individual reads and writes he gradually learns to close or inhibit the input of his senses, to inhibit or control the responses of his body, so as to train energy and thought upon the written words. He resists the environment outside him by distinguishing and controlling the one inside him. This constitutes at first a laborious and painful effort..., [an effort in which the individual] becomes aware of the interior self as an entity separable from the environment and its input, controllable by his own mental action."

So she reads out this passage, and then to elucidate the "laborious and painful effort," she says something to this effect:

"Remember when you were in kindergarten? And it was so hard because you had to sit at this little desk for long periods, looking at these little black squiggles on the paper and trying to make sense of them when the whole world was out there and you just wanted to go run around in it."

For me, the sheer unrelatability of that example is what drove the point home. It's not just that I didn't go to kindergarten, and it's not just that I always enjoyed sitting at a desk studying at least as much as running around, though that's getting closer to the heart of the issue. It's that I don't even remember learning to read. I remember learning how to write, in a sense, or at least how to spell, but as far my memory is concerned I've always been literate. I do have a few memories that probably occurred before I could read, but none in which learning how or not being able to was a feature.

Now here's the oh-shit part. Everyone who knows me knows I'm a highly abstract person. I live in my head; all I do is play with ideas. This whole facet of my personality, and the coupled drive to seek out sensational intensity - is it perhaps, in large part, a product of learning to read early? It's like a smack upside the head to think that such a fundamental part of who I am and what I've chosen to do for the last 10-15 years could be primarily derived from such a stupidly simple, and somewhat chance occurrence. Still, I suppose it could be that I always had the disposition and that's why I latched onto reading quickly. Even then, though, what does it say about the culture at large? Does literacy increase the potential of a society to produce people like me? Does it increase the upper limit of abstraction possible by its members? Do illiterate societies have an advantage in sensory awareness that is lost when writing is developed? Or do both kinds of society have equal potential at the extremes, but simply a probabilistic tendency toward one end or the other?