Reading in the Brain

Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention Hardcover – Bargain Price, November 12, 2009
Author: Visit ‘s Stanislas Dehaene Page ID: B003H4RAOU

From Publishers Weekly

The transparent and automatic feat of reading comprehension disguises an intricate biological effort, ably analyzed in this fascinating study. Drawing on scads of brain-imaging studies, case histories of stroke victims and ingenious cognitive psychology experiments, cognitive neuroscientist Dehaene (The Number Sense) diagrams the neural machinery that translates marks on paper into language, sound and meaning. It’s a complex and surprising circuitry, both specific, in that it is housed in parts of the cortex that perform specific processing tasks, and puzzlingly abstract. (The brain, Dehaene hypothesizes, registers words mainly as collections of pairs of letters.) The author proposes reading as an example of neuronal recycling—the recruitment of previously evolved neural circuits to accomplish cultural innovations—and uses this idea to explore how ancient scribes shaped writing systems around the brain’s potential and limitations. (He likewise attacks modern whole language reading pedagogy as an unnatural imposition on a brain attuned to learning by phonics.) This lively, lucid treatise proves once again that Dehaene is one of our most gifted expositors of science; he makes the workings of the mind less mysterious, but no less miraculous. Illus. (Nov. 16)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

About the Author

French scientist Stanislas Dehaene is a world authority on the cognitive neuroscience of language and number processing in the human brain. He is the director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, a professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is the author of several books, including The Number Sense. In 2008 he was profiled in The New Yorker for his work in numerical cognition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Hardcover: 400 pagesPublisher: Viking Adult; 1 edition (November 12, 2009)Language: EnglishISBN-10: 0670021105ID: B003H4RAOU Product Dimensions: 6.4 x 1.4 x 9.3 inches Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces Best Sellers Rank: #568,017 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #370 in Books > Science & Math > Science for Kids #893 in Books > Reference > Words, Language & Grammar > Reading Skills #912 in Books > Medical Books > Psychology > Neuropsychology
One of the last chapters opens with an epigraph from Umberto Eco "If God existed, he would be a library."

Which tickled my fancy, but doesn’t necessarily portray Dehaene’s stance about how inborn structural properties of our brain are co-opted and retrained (neuronal recycling)in order for humans to develop the ability to recognize words and understand them (no matter if Chinese or French.)

"Recycling, on the other hand, implies that before cortical regions convert to other uses, they already possess prior structural properties inherited from evolution. Each cortical region starts out with a portfolio of assets and liabilities that are only partially rearranged by learning."

Dehaene uses most of his book to describe in detail the work of various researchers in figuring out where certain processes in the brain reside. His development of a theory of the "letterbox", or a parallel series of processes/areas that get activated in order to recognize letters is fascinating stuff. However, for a laywoman like me (I’m from a language acquisition education background, but by no means a scientist)it was heavy duty reading.

I slogged through it nonetheless, and emerged with an interesting view on how evolution might have prepared our brain in two important ways: by helping us be expert recognizers of primary geometric shapes and b) giving us the ability to recognize mirror images of objects even if we’ve only seen a profile.

Again, it was heavy technical speak about different sections of the brain, but ultimately manageable.
Download Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention – Bargain Price, November 12, 2009 Pdf Download

SamitaTangguh772