Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
Stanislas Dehaene
Language: English
Pages: 400
ISBN: 0670021105
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
How can a few black marks on a white page evoke an entire universe of sounds and meanings? In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene provides an accessible account of the brain circuitry of reading and explores what he calls the ?reading paradox?: Our cortex is the product of millions of years of evolution in a world without writing, so how did it adapt to recognize words? Reading in the Brain describes pioneering research on how we process language, revealing the hidden logic of spelling and the existence of powerful unconscious mechanisms for decoding words of any size, case, or font.
Dehaene?s research will fascinate not only readers interested in science and culture, but also educators concerned with debates on how we learn to read, and who wrestle with pathologies such as dyslexia. Like Steven Pinker, Dehaene argues that the mind is not a blank slate: Writing systems across all cultures rely on the same brain circuits, and reading is only possible insofar as it fits within the limits of a primate brain. Setting cutting-edge science in the context of cultural debate, Reading in the Brain is an unparalleled guide to a uniquely human ability.
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target words that were easy to read, even for dyslexics, so that performance was identical in all groups. A control task consisted of watching letter-like geometrical shapes. The comparison of the dyslexics with their respective control groups revealed a clear anomaly. A whole chunk of their left temporal lobe was insufficiently active. Furthermore, this reduced brain activity was observed at the same location and to the same degree for all three nationalities (figure 6.1). Paulesu’s results
One would therefore expect such an organism to perform symmetrical gestures with its two limbs—or, if some degree of noise creeps in, randomly raise the left or right hand in response to a verbal command. Amazingly, the theoretical limits of symmetrical organisms coincide with experimental observations of animals and young children. No child has any difficulty in naming a familiar object, even seen from a new angle. When he holds a ball in the right hand no child ever moves his left arm in order
Ellis, 2004). 37 Reicher, 1969; Ferrand, 2001, pp. 58-63. 38 Spoehr & Smith, 1975; Rumelhart & McClelland, 1982. 39 In chapter 3, we will see that recent observations on the neural coding of words qualify this definition of lexical neighbors as words that differ by a single letter. If words are encoded using pairs of letters, or bigrams, as suggested by several studies (Grainger & van Heuven, 2003; Grainger & Whitney, 2004; Dehaene, Cohen, Sigman, & Vinckier, 2005), we should probably
the Korean language. “Because our language differs from the Chinese language,” he said, “my poor people cannot express their thoughts in Chinese writing. In my pity for them, I create 28 letters which all can easily learn and use in their daily lives.” This is how the Hangul writing was born in 1446. Nowadays, close to six centuries later, twenty-four of its twenty-eight characters remain in use. Its rational combination of phonetic, alphabetic, and syllabic principles makes it one of the most
Listening to a spoken word did not put any of these regions into motion but did trigger activity in a distinct set of sites in the superior and middle temporal cortex, corresponding to processing of hearing and speech perception. The production of a spoken word, on the other hand, stimulated an anterior region of the left hemisphere, close to the area first linked to speech production by the French neurologist Paul Broca in the nineteenth century, as well as the left and right motor areas.