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Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
A renowned cognitive neuroscientist?s fascinating and highly informative account of how the brain acquires reading
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 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.
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 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.
388 pages, Hardcover
First published August 30, 2007
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 187 reviews
May 23, 2023
It's fascinating how remarkable the very few things are that have been learned about the brain so far.
How´s your brain working?
Brain research, which is in its infancy, can definitively be described as a guarantee for future surprises and groundbreaking discoveries. The work sheds light on the wonder of the operation of the control center, with a particular focus on reading, and exploration of impressive facts. How the coordinated processes in different areas of the brain work, although slow compared to a computer, but efficient due to the immense interconnection capacity, amazes. Each fragment of the letter, up to the whole word and sentence, is made comprehensible through a perfectly coordinated interplay of different brain areas.
That´s just the hardware
From the initial contact via visual perception, the splitting of the seen into many individual components, a re-assembly by specialized neurons and the phonological classification, just imperceptible fragments of times, milliseconds, are passing, in which enormous quantities of data are processed in the upper room behind the eyes.
Experiments, maladies, and accidents
Dehaene uses the description of experiments, animal testing, MRI recordings, and the consequences of illness or accidental brain damage as a way of illustration. However, the acceptable results of surgical intervention and other manipulations of experimental animal brains are even less remarkable than the frightening consequences of individual strokes and accidents. The findings that can be distilled from the observation of the changes in perception and abilities caused by diseases are among the most valuable data for scientists.
The brain does DIY
Thanks to modern recording methods, the affected, damaged areas can be precisely identified and thus conclusions about the functions and tasks of specific regions of the brain can be drawn. When the patient is lucky and the incident or affliction has not caused irreversible damage, the human body sometimes counters with a redesign of adjacent areas to resettle lost abilities in other neurons to be reprogrammed.
High speed evolution of the written word
This neuroplasticity is also found in healthy people and was a significant driver of the ability to learn reading. By modifying brain areas dedicated to other tasks, they specialized in the processing of letters and the understanding of the written word. It happened in, compared to the history of human evolution, in a surprisingly short time since the advent of the first higher communication attempts some tens of thousands of years ago. This short period was sufficient to make character recognition complexes sophisticated enough to coordinate them with other areas.
Freaking grammar
How complex this is can be illustrated with the necessary double anchoring. Only by listening, seeing, or reading alone learning the letter is very difficult. Just by combining these sensory impressions with stimulation of different brain areas, satisfactory results can be achieved. The parallels between all writing and languages are based on the need to incorporate the requirements of our thinking center. Without an understandable and learnable writing system that is tailored to the brain's needs, literacy is not possible. The way to the modern alphabet was correspondingly longer and more complicated, because the right combination of signs, pronunciation, and grammar, which was both learnable and applicable, had to be found.
Future theories are welcome
Cultural history is still in the dark and unknown and will be better understood with the help of new, future findings. Further research results will, even from the anthropological point of view, reveal something astounding. However, the insights should not only be considered for a better understanding of our past development but also in the sense of the further evolution of reading. This would include breaking up the rigid and restrictive concepts of the school system, which has the always same conservative, outdated answer to the individual and different reading literacy of a child as it has to most, no let´s say all, other concerns.
Oldschool pedagogy not so much
Antiquated teaching methods, that are not involving concepts based on the findings of modern medical research, produce an overwhelming superiority of people who reject any reading as soon as they have left school. At best these are at least not functional illiterates. As if there was no need for further pathetic displays to illustrate the necessity to modernize and restructure the whole school system. Otherwise, such valuable insights as those of this work fall into oblivion, unreflected and not understood by those forced to read it in class.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading
How´s your brain working?
Brain research, which is in its infancy, can definitively be described as a guarantee for future surprises and groundbreaking discoveries. The work sheds light on the wonder of the operation of the control center, with a particular focus on reading, and exploration of impressive facts. How the coordinated processes in different areas of the brain work, although slow compared to a computer, but efficient due to the immense interconnection capacity, amazes. Each fragment of the letter, up to the whole word and sentence, is made comprehensible through a perfectly coordinated interplay of different brain areas.
That´s just the hardware
From the initial contact via visual perception, the splitting of the seen into many individual components, a re-assembly by specialized neurons and the phonological classification, just imperceptible fragments of times, milliseconds, are passing, in which enormous quantities of data are processed in the upper room behind the eyes.
Experiments, maladies, and accidents
Dehaene uses the description of experiments, animal testing, MRI recordings, and the consequences of illness or accidental brain damage as a way of illustration. However, the acceptable results of surgical intervention and other manipulations of experimental animal brains are even less remarkable than the frightening consequences of individual strokes and accidents. The findings that can be distilled from the observation of the changes in perception and abilities caused by diseases are among the most valuable data for scientists.
The brain does DIY
Thanks to modern recording methods, the affected, damaged areas can be precisely identified and thus conclusions about the functions and tasks of specific regions of the brain can be drawn. When the patient is lucky and the incident or affliction has not caused irreversible damage, the human body sometimes counters with a redesign of adjacent areas to resettle lost abilities in other neurons to be reprogrammed.
High speed evolution of the written word
This neuroplasticity is also found in healthy people and was a significant driver of the ability to learn reading. By modifying brain areas dedicated to other tasks, they specialized in the processing of letters and the understanding of the written word. It happened in, compared to the history of human evolution, in a surprisingly short time since the advent of the first higher communication attempts some tens of thousands of years ago. This short period was sufficient to make character recognition complexes sophisticated enough to coordinate them with other areas.
Freaking grammar
How complex this is can be illustrated with the necessary double anchoring. Only by listening, seeing, or reading alone learning the letter is very difficult. Just by combining these sensory impressions with stimulation of different brain areas, satisfactory results can be achieved. The parallels between all writing and languages are based on the need to incorporate the requirements of our thinking center. Without an understandable and learnable writing system that is tailored to the brain's needs, literacy is not possible. The way to the modern alphabet was correspondingly longer and more complicated, because the right combination of signs, pronunciation, and grammar, which was both learnable and applicable, had to be found.
Future theories are welcome
Cultural history is still in the dark and unknown and will be better understood with the help of new, future findings. Further research results will, even from the anthropological point of view, reveal something astounding. However, the insights should not only be considered for a better understanding of our past development but also in the sense of the further evolution of reading. This would include breaking up the rigid and restrictive concepts of the school system, which has the always same conservative, outdated answer to the individual and different reading literacy of a child as it has to most, no let´s say all, other concerns.
Oldschool pedagogy not so much
Antiquated teaching methods, that are not involving concepts based on the findings of modern medical research, produce an overwhelming superiority of people who reject any reading as soon as they have left school. At best these are at least not functional illiterates. As if there was no need for further pathetic displays to illustrate the necessity to modernize and restructure the whole school system. Otherwise, such valuable insights as those of this work fall into oblivion, unreflected and not understood by those forced to read it in class.
A wiki walk can be as refreshing to the mind as a walk through nature in this completely overrated real-life outside books:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reading
November 23, 2017
In questo viaggio corticale, scopro che il mio cervello da primate compie acrobazie immani per leggere. La lettura è frutto dell'evoluzione umana e uno dei maggiori artefici della sua esplosione culturale. L'espansione della corteccia prefrontale ha permesso alla nostra specie di inventare la scrittura. Questa invenzione ha sviluppato una memoria supplementare, esterna e duratura. Per questo motivo la lettura è la prima "protesi della mente".
Siamo dotati di circuiti neuronali capaci di imparare a leggere. E tu, che ora leggi questo mio commento, sappi che stai effettuando quattro o cinque saccadi al secondo per portare queste parole nella tua fovea! :-)
P.S. Un bel libro, che spiega, in modo comprensibile, a chi come me è digiuno in materia, come il nostro cervello impari a leggere. E ancor di più amo la lettura!
Siamo dotati di circuiti neuronali capaci di imparare a leggere. E tu, che ora leggi questo mio commento, sappi che stai effettuando quattro o cinque saccadi al secondo per portare queste parole nella tua fovea! :-)
P.S. Un bel libro, che spiega, in modo comprensibile, a chi come me è digiuno in materia, come il nostro cervello impari a leggere. E ancor di più amo la lettura!
Read
May 18, 2010This book seemed a little forbidding at first, The first chapter was readable enough, but Chapter 2, which is clearly critical to an understanding of the rest of the book, got very hairy very fast. Scads of diagrams of the brains from various angles and a veritable cornucopia of fMRI scans, rounded out by that sad, inevitable procession of case studies whose weirdly specific malfunction* proved essential in nailing the link between a particular brain activity and the location of the region that governs it under normal conditions. Not to mention all those slightly creepy latinate names for the different parts of the brain, which, let's face it, most of us would just rather not be thinking about.
I'm happy to report that, once I finally got my ass in gear, Chapter 2 turned out to be extremely clearly written and not all that hard to understand. So I'm well on my way. It's pretty cool stuff, too.
*: an inability to distinguish the image of one's child from that of a raccoon when seen in the rear view mirror, mistaking one's wife for a common electrodomestic appliance, the belief that Sarah Palin is human, developing an unseemly erotic crush on the tooth fairy, that kind of thing ....
I'm happy to report that, once I finally got my ass in gear, Chapter 2 turned out to be extremely clearly written and not all that hard to understand. So I'm well on my way. It's pretty cool stuff, too.
*: an inability to distinguish the image of one's child from that of a raccoon when seen in the rear view mirror, mistaking one's wife for a common electrodomestic appliance, the belief that Sarah Palin is human, developing an unseemly erotic crush on the tooth fairy, that kind of thing ....
September 29, 2016
This was a really, really fascinating read, and surprisingly easy to grasp considering the technical subject. I actually read it surprisingly fast, and it was definitely the sort of book that provoked a lot of turning to my partner to ask “did you know that…”. It also made me ask a ton of questions of my mother about how I learned to read, why I learned to read late, etc, and honestly had me wondering if I should volunteer for a study on reading — the methods of reading and learning to read that Dehaene mentions don’t seem to apply to me, despite the studies backing up his hypotheses.
I can only really react to this book via my own personal experience/understanding, so this is going to veer off into anecdata a lot. On a purely intellectual level, it seems as if Dehaene’s theories are sound (although I’m not sure his model of synaesthesia is correct). Some of his phrasing was… mildly offensive to me, for example describing synaesthetes as “mostly not crackpots”. Why on earth would an intelligent person, a scientist, even connect synaesthesia with delusions? I know uninformed people sometimes do, but a scientist should know that the brains of synaesthetes genuinely cause them to experience (for example) words in colour, and not talk about them being “convinced” that they do, or describe them as “mostly not crackpots”.
Anyway, on an anecdotal level, Dehaene’s model doesn’t fit me at all. I didn’t/couldn’t learn to read via phonics. At all. I was eventually got reading via essentially the Whole Word method, and I still don’t connect graphemes and phonemes well at all. If I see a new word, I don’t actually think at all about how to pronounce it; I get the meaning from context, and mentally tag the image of the word with it. I only think about how to pronounce a word when I eventually find cause to say it (and then I will more often than not get it wrong). Dehaene not only thinks that doesn’t work as a way to learn words, but the model of dyslexia he proposes is essentially focused on that inability to connect phonemes and graphemes. By the logic in this book, I should be a very limited reader — yet from as quickly as a year after finally learning to read (and I was slow), I was routinely getting the reading score of an adult, and reading adult books fast and voraciously.
Probably there’s some crossover in the fact that I’m synaesthetic; as a child, I apparently complained that the books school gave me to learn from “tasted bad”. And given how terrible my visual skills (particularly the ones located in the same area of the brain Dehaene identifies as the brain’s word form area) are, I’ve got to wonder if maybe learning to read without the phonetic route caused more of my brain to specialise in reading than average.
In any case, it’s a fascinating topic and Dehaene’s book is mostly very readable and, as far as I can tell, mostly inoffensive — though the way he talks about synaesthetes makes me wonder if dyslexic people might also be less than pleased with the descriptions here. I’m definitely going to look up other pop science (or maybe even some studies) about how reading works in the brain; I’d like to know if any other theories describe my way of reading better, and what developments have emerged since this book was written.
Originally posted here.
I can only really react to this book via my own personal experience/understanding, so this is going to veer off into anecdata a lot. On a purely intellectual level, it seems as if Dehaene’s theories are sound (although I’m not sure his model of synaesthesia is correct). Some of his phrasing was… mildly offensive to me, for example describing synaesthetes as “mostly not crackpots”. Why on earth would an intelligent person, a scientist, even connect synaesthesia with delusions? I know uninformed people sometimes do, but a scientist should know that the brains of synaesthetes genuinely cause them to experience (for example) words in colour, and not talk about them being “convinced” that they do, or describe them as “mostly not crackpots”.
Anyway, on an anecdotal level, Dehaene’s model doesn’t fit me at all. I didn’t/couldn’t learn to read via phonics. At all. I was eventually got reading via essentially the Whole Word method, and I still don’t connect graphemes and phonemes well at all. If I see a new word, I don’t actually think at all about how to pronounce it; I get the meaning from context, and mentally tag the image of the word with it. I only think about how to pronounce a word when I eventually find cause to say it (and then I will more often than not get it wrong). Dehaene not only thinks that doesn’t work as a way to learn words, but the model of dyslexia he proposes is essentially focused on that inability to connect phonemes and graphemes. By the logic in this book, I should be a very limited reader — yet from as quickly as a year after finally learning to read (and I was slow), I was routinely getting the reading score of an adult, and reading adult books fast and voraciously.
Probably there’s some crossover in the fact that I’m synaesthetic; as a child, I apparently complained that the books school gave me to learn from “tasted bad”. And given how terrible my visual skills (particularly the ones located in the same area of the brain Dehaene identifies as the brain’s word form area) are, I’ve got to wonder if maybe learning to read without the phonetic route caused more of my brain to specialise in reading than average.
In any case, it’s a fascinating topic and Dehaene’s book is mostly very readable and, as far as I can tell, mostly inoffensive — though the way he talks about synaesthetes makes me wonder if dyslexic people might also be less than pleased with the descriptions here. I’m definitely going to look up other pop science (or maybe even some studies) about how reading works in the brain; I’d like to know if any other theories describe my way of reading better, and what developments have emerged since this book was written.
Originally posted here.
April 12, 2024
Die Schrift und damit das Lesen sind nicht nur eine einzigartige Erfindung der Menschheit, es ist auch der wichtigste Baustein für die rasante Entwicklung und Weitergabe der Kultur. Der französische Kognitionswissenschaftler, Mathematiker und Psychologe Stanislas Dehaene erforscht zusammen mit seinem Team, was beim Lesen biologisch passiert und verbindet diese Erkenntnisse mit der Kulturwissenschaft. Letzteres dürfte auch für eine Leserschaft interessant sein, der die zahlreichen physiologischen Details zu einschlägig wären.
Denn gut die Hälfte des Buchs befasst sich mit den neuronalen Aspekten des Lesens, einem äußerst komplexen Prozess. Die Buchstaben werden schon in den Zellen der Retina in tausende Bestandteile zerlegt, die so entstandenen Informationen über die Sehbahnen weitergeleitet, sortiert und wieder zusammengesetzt, in verschiedenen miteinander verknüpften Hirnarealen phonetisch und lexikalisch ausgewertet, um uns am Ende den Sinn der Zeichen bewusst zu machen.
Weitere Kapitel befassen sich mit der Entstehung der Schrift, dem Lesenlernen und der Legasthenie. Ich fand es besonders überraschend, dass die Ursache der Legasthenie, zumindest bei einem Großteil der Betroffenen, ein genetisch bedingter, phonologischer Defekt sein dürfte. Offenbar sind die Phoneme, die Lauteinheiten, von entscheidender Bedeutung beim Leseerwerb. So ist auch die sogenannte Ganzwort-Methode eine pädagogische Fehlentwicklung. Dabei wird nämlich die Verknüpfung der Grapheme mit ihren zugehörigen Phonemen übergangen, die gerade die Neubildung der neuronalen Strukturen, die für flüssiges Lesen erforderlich sind, maßgeblich anregt.
Das führt zum vielleicht interessantesten Aspekt des Buches. Die Evolution hat die zum Lesen notwendigen neuronalen Strukturen im Gehirn ja nicht vorgesehen. Eine evolutionäre Anpassung hätte viel länger gedauert als die drei- oder viertausend Jahre seit Erfindung der Schrift, oder auch die wenigen zehntausend Jahre, seitdem unsere Vorfahren Zeichen in Höhlen malten.
Dehaene schlägt dazu den Begriff "neuronales Recycling" vor: Bereits vorhandene Strukturen des Gehirns, die etwa für die Objekterkennung vorgesehen sind, können in wenigen Jahren mit Hilfe neuronaler Plastizität für neue Zwecke adaptiert werden. Im Gegenzug hat das einen Preis, es ist keine Überraschung, dass wir modernen Leser das Lesen der Natur, das Spurenlesen oder andere subtile Fertigkeiten der Objekterkennung, die uns bei nativen Völkern erstaunen, verlernt haben, sozusagen gegen das Lesen von Buchstaben eingetauscht haben. Welche Fähigkeiten wir wohl opfern werden, um unser Gehirn an die digitale Kultur anzupassen?
Eine ganz wesentliche Konsequenz dieser Erkenntnisse ist auch, dass Schrift und ganz allgemein Kultur nicht beliebig sein können, sondern in ihrer Entwicklung und Ausformung auf die vorgegebenen biologischen Bedingungen beschränkt sind. Persönlich überrascht mich das nicht, es ist das aber eine Absage an jeden kulturellen Relativismus, was manchen zeitgenössischen Soziologen oder Kulturtheoretikern gar nicht schmecken dürfte.
Ich bin auf das Buch gestossen, weil mir Stanislas Dehaene aus der Bewusstseinsforschung ein Begriff ist. Obwohl es ein bisschen sperrig ist, hat es mich inspiriert und in den meisten Teilen überzeugt - gerade auch weil es zeigt, wie spekulativ und begrenzt unser Wissen in diesen Bereichen noch ist.
Die Übersetzung könnte besser sein, was Leser, die in der zerebralen Anatomie nicht so sattelfest sind, verunsichern könnte. Dazu trägt auch die bescheidene grafische Ausstattung bei - alle farbigen Abbildungen sind in den Anhang verbannt, sehr klein und unzureichend erklärt. Ich würde mir eine Website mit ergänzendem Material wünschen, das würde den Zugang und das Verständnis sehr erleichtern.
Wer Interesse an physiologischen Details des Gehirns hat, dem würde ich das Buch empfehlen. Pädagogen sollten sich jedoch nicht zu viel erwarten. Es ist nicht Ziel des Buches, Anleitungen für einen neurodidaktisch optimierten Leseunterricht zu liefern (die Hirnforschung ist noch nicht so weit). Vielleicht ist aber allein die Information schon wertvoll, dass es für Kinder förderlicher ist, Zeichen und Laute zu verbinden als zB. das Wort Katze mit dem Bild einer Katze. Vielleicht ist unsere Zeit zu sehr visuell geprägt, und wir sollten den Klängen wieder mehr Aufmerksamkeit schenken.
Denn gut die Hälfte des Buchs befasst sich mit den neuronalen Aspekten des Lesens, einem äußerst komplexen Prozess. Die Buchstaben werden schon in den Zellen der Retina in tausende Bestandteile zerlegt, die so entstandenen Informationen über die Sehbahnen weitergeleitet, sortiert und wieder zusammengesetzt, in verschiedenen miteinander verknüpften Hirnarealen phonetisch und lexikalisch ausgewertet, um uns am Ende den Sinn der Zeichen bewusst zu machen.
Weitere Kapitel befassen sich mit der Entstehung der Schrift, dem Lesenlernen und der Legasthenie. Ich fand es besonders überraschend, dass die Ursache der Legasthenie, zumindest bei einem Großteil der Betroffenen, ein genetisch bedingter, phonologischer Defekt sein dürfte. Offenbar sind die Phoneme, die Lauteinheiten, von entscheidender Bedeutung beim Leseerwerb. So ist auch die sogenannte Ganzwort-Methode eine pädagogische Fehlentwicklung. Dabei wird nämlich die Verknüpfung der Grapheme mit ihren zugehörigen Phonemen übergangen, die gerade die Neubildung der neuronalen Strukturen, die für flüssiges Lesen erforderlich sind, maßgeblich anregt.
Das führt zum vielleicht interessantesten Aspekt des Buches. Die Evolution hat die zum Lesen notwendigen neuronalen Strukturen im Gehirn ja nicht vorgesehen. Eine evolutionäre Anpassung hätte viel länger gedauert als die drei- oder viertausend Jahre seit Erfindung der Schrift, oder auch die wenigen zehntausend Jahre, seitdem unsere Vorfahren Zeichen in Höhlen malten.
Dehaene schlägt dazu den Begriff "neuronales Recycling" vor: Bereits vorhandene Strukturen des Gehirns, die etwa für die Objekterkennung vorgesehen sind, können in wenigen Jahren mit Hilfe neuronaler Plastizität für neue Zwecke adaptiert werden. Im Gegenzug hat das einen Preis, es ist keine Überraschung, dass wir modernen Leser das Lesen der Natur, das Spurenlesen oder andere subtile Fertigkeiten der Objekterkennung, die uns bei nativen Völkern erstaunen, verlernt haben, sozusagen gegen das Lesen von Buchstaben eingetauscht haben. Welche Fähigkeiten wir wohl opfern werden, um unser Gehirn an die digitale Kultur anzupassen?
Eine ganz wesentliche Konsequenz dieser Erkenntnisse ist auch, dass Schrift und ganz allgemein Kultur nicht beliebig sein können, sondern in ihrer Entwicklung und Ausformung auf die vorgegebenen biologischen Bedingungen beschränkt sind. Persönlich überrascht mich das nicht, es ist das aber eine Absage an jeden kulturellen Relativismus, was manchen zeitgenössischen Soziologen oder Kulturtheoretikern gar nicht schmecken dürfte.
Ich bin auf das Buch gestossen, weil mir Stanislas Dehaene aus der Bewusstseinsforschung ein Begriff ist. Obwohl es ein bisschen sperrig ist, hat es mich inspiriert und in den meisten Teilen überzeugt - gerade auch weil es zeigt, wie spekulativ und begrenzt unser Wissen in diesen Bereichen noch ist.
Die Übersetzung könnte besser sein, was Leser, die in der zerebralen Anatomie nicht so sattelfest sind, verunsichern könnte. Dazu trägt auch die bescheidene grafische Ausstattung bei - alle farbigen Abbildungen sind in den Anhang verbannt, sehr klein und unzureichend erklärt. Ich würde mir eine Website mit ergänzendem Material wünschen, das würde den Zugang und das Verständnis sehr erleichtern.
Wer Interesse an physiologischen Details des Gehirns hat, dem würde ich das Buch empfehlen. Pädagogen sollten sich jedoch nicht zu viel erwarten. Es ist nicht Ziel des Buches, Anleitungen für einen neurodidaktisch optimierten Leseunterricht zu liefern (die Hirnforschung ist noch nicht so weit). Vielleicht ist aber allein die Information schon wertvoll, dass es für Kinder förderlicher ist, Zeichen und Laute zu verbinden als zB. das Wort Katze mit dem Bild einer Katze. Vielleicht ist unsere Zeit zu sehr visuell geprägt, und wir sollten den Klängen wieder mehr Aufmerksamkeit schenken.
December 14, 2020
เหมาะกับคนรักการอ่านที่อยากจะเข้าใจกระบวนการและกลไกในการอ่านที่เกิดขึ้นในระดับสมอง เราอ่านจนเป็นเรื่องปกติ แทบจะตลอดเวลาจนเราชินและมองข้ามมันไป แต่จริงๆแล้วมันซับซ้อนซ่อนเงื่อน สมองหลายส่วนทำงานร่วมกัน และต้องใช้เวลาหลายปีฝึกฝนกว่าจะทำได้ขนาดนี้ ทั้งๆที่ธรรมชาติไม่ได้ออกแบบสมองมนุษย์มาเพื่อการอ่าน และก็เพิ่งมีการประดิษฐ์ตัวอักษรมาไม่กี่พันปีนี้เองซึ่งถือว่าน้อยมากถ้าเทียบกับวิวัฒนาการของมนุษยชาติ หนังสือเล่มนี้จะอธิบายว่ามันเกิดขึ้นได้อย่างไร
แค่บทแรกๆก็ตอบหลายคำถามที่เราเคยสงสัยเกี่ยวกับการอ่าน เช่นทำไมขนาดของฟอนท และจำนวนตัวหนังสือของคำไม่ได้ส่งผลต่อความเร็วในการอ่าน ทำไมจำความหมายของคำบางคำไม่ได้ซักทีทั้งที่เจอบ่อยมาก แต่อ่านๆไปเรื่อยๆก็เริ่มมึน ศัพท์เทคนิคค่อนข้างเยอะ ใช้เวลาเป็นเดือนกว่าจะอ่านจบ แต่ก็ดีใจที่สำเร็จ
แค่บทแรกๆก็ตอบหลายคำถามที่เราเคยสงสัยเกี่ยวกับการอ่าน เช่นทำไมขนาดของฟอนท และจำนวนตัวหนังสือของคำไม่ได้ส่งผลต่อความเร็วในการอ่าน ทำไมจำความหมายของคำบางคำไม่ได้ซักทีทั้งที่เจอบ่อยมาก แต่อ่านๆไปเรื่อยๆก็เริ่มมึน ศัพท์เทคนิคค่อนข้างเยอะ ใช้เวลาเป็นเดือนกว่าจะอ่านจบ แต่ก็ดีใจที่สำเร็จ
May 27, 2022
Bisher hatte ich noch nie darüber nachgedacht, welches Wunder das Lesen ist, denn unser Gehirn ist dafür von der Natur nicht eingerichtet und evolutionäre Prozesse gehen nicht so schnell, wie sich die Kulturtechnik des Lesens entwickelte. Dehaene versucht in gut verständlichem Ton, die Vorgänge im Gehirn zu erklären und dabei den derzeitigen Stand der Wissenschaft und die angewandten Nachweismethoden darzustellen. Als einer der führenden Kognitionswissenschaftler weiß er sehr genau, wovon er schreibt, man erhält also aktuelle wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse aus erster Hand.
Sehr spannend fand ich die Erläuterung des „neuronalen Recycling“, bei dem Hirnregionen für das Lesen genutzt werden, die ursprünglich für andere Dinge zuständig waren. Aus den Abläufen im Gehirn ergibt sich die einzige Art des Lesenlernens – das Erlernen des Zusammenhangs zwischen Graphem und Phonem, was erstaunlicherweise in allen Sprachen funktioniert, da selbst die chinesischen Schriftzeichen Phoneme enthalten.
Aus den (begrenzten) Möglichkeiten des Gehirns lässt sich die Entwicklung der Schrift erklären. Auch das ein sehr interessantes Kapitel, das zeigt, dass Schriften wie die ägyptischen Hieroglyphen an Grenzen stießen und sich zwangsweise eine Schrift entwickeln musste, die sich an Lauten orientiert. Unser Gehirn ist kein unbeschriebenes Blatt, auf dem sich mit Training alles unterbringen lässt, es gibt Strukturen, die sich für eine Kulturtechnik wie das Lesen nutzen lassen, aber nur in bestimmten Grenzen. Die Lesegeschwindigkeit lässt sich auch mit ausgefeilten Techniken nicht immer mehr steigern, was angesichts der begrenzten Lesezeit schade sein mag, mich aber beruhigte.
Ein Kapitel ist der Legasthenie gewidmet, die in unterschiedlichen Formen auftritt, meist aber genetisch bedingt mit der Lautverarbeitung im Gehirn zu tun haben. Darüber hinaus geht es um Lesen und die Symmetrie sowie um allgemeine Überlegungen zur Verbindung von Kultur und Gehirn.
Nicht alles habe ich verstanden, das meiste aber wurde anschaulich erläutert, wobei Grafiken und Bilder den Text hilfreich ergänzten. Ein sehr interessanter Einblick in die Funktionsweise des Gehirns und die täglich angewendete Kulturtechnik des Lesens.
Sehr spannend fand ich die Erläuterung des „neuronalen Recycling“, bei dem Hirnregionen für das Lesen genutzt werden, die ursprünglich für andere Dinge zuständig waren. Aus den Abläufen im Gehirn ergibt sich die einzige Art des Lesenlernens – das Erlernen des Zusammenhangs zwischen Graphem und Phonem, was erstaunlicherweise in allen Sprachen funktioniert, da selbst die chinesischen Schriftzeichen Phoneme enthalten.
Aus den (begrenzten) Möglichkeiten des Gehirns lässt sich die Entwicklung der Schrift erklären. Auch das ein sehr interessantes Kapitel, das zeigt, dass Schriften wie die ägyptischen Hieroglyphen an Grenzen stießen und sich zwangsweise eine Schrift entwickeln musste, die sich an Lauten orientiert. Unser Gehirn ist kein unbeschriebenes Blatt, auf dem sich mit Training alles unterbringen lässt, es gibt Strukturen, die sich für eine Kulturtechnik wie das Lesen nutzen lassen, aber nur in bestimmten Grenzen. Die Lesegeschwindigkeit lässt sich auch mit ausgefeilten Techniken nicht immer mehr steigern, was angesichts der begrenzten Lesezeit schade sein mag, mich aber beruhigte.
Ein Kapitel ist der Legasthenie gewidmet, die in unterschiedlichen Formen auftritt, meist aber genetisch bedingt mit der Lautverarbeitung im Gehirn zu tun haben. Darüber hinaus geht es um Lesen und die Symmetrie sowie um allgemeine Überlegungen zur Verbindung von Kultur und Gehirn.
Nicht alles habe ich verstanden, das meiste aber wurde anschaulich erläutert, wobei Grafiken und Bilder den Text hilfreich ergänzten. Ein sehr interessanter Einblick in die Funktionsweise des Gehirns und die täglich angewendete Kulturtechnik des Lesens.
July 11, 2013
There is something wonderfully ironical about this book: It purports to defend from enemies everywhere the act of reading, while doing so in a way that makes even the lustiest reader temporarily hate the written word.
This book is terribly written; its author encapsulates a goodish number of ideas "in a nutshell" and likens three or four sets of ideas to "tip(s) of the iceberg" and feels compelled to finish many nearly unreadable sections of chapters with "in summary." Its largest value is a reflexive one in the sense of the book acting on itself: In the first 50 or so pages, Stanislas Dehaene provides justification enough for speed reading - bypassing the aural part of reading - that one quickly adapts this explanation as a prescription, gradually improving his speed with this book from 300 words/minute to 800 words/minute, as he realizes nothing will be lost.
Even at this incredible speed, a good reader arrives at one essential set of sentences in the book's first third:
Overall, although researchers have managed to map several of the relevant brain areas, how meaning is actually coded in the cortex remains a frustrating issue. The process that allows our neuronal networks to snap together and "make sense" remains utterly mysterious. (p. 111)
There you have it. For each word, the brain takes a large number of dots from the fovea of the eye, reassembles them into a recognizable pattern or "word" then sends a query to its lexicon, retrieving meaning and assigning it to something like a temporary memory space, from which it is linked to other words, forming a sentence. Each words takes less than a tenth of a second. How is this done? Magic!
If a complete understanding of the human brain is a 300-page book, contemporary neuroscience is nearly to the end of its first sentence, and at least 50 years from completing its first paragraph. When compared to a layman's knowledge of their field, scientists like Dehaene appear immensely knowledgeable. When one considers, however, what percentage of their field they've mastered, one comes away with an entirely different view of them.
Most of this book comprises arcane case studies that disprove minutia valued by perhaps a thousand people in the world, or devolves into odd score-settling with those who do not love Charles Darwin. This book will not make you a better reader or help you cure dyslexia, but it might just help you put the wood to a helpless school administrator at your kid's next pool party.
This book is terribly written; its author encapsulates a goodish number of ideas "in a nutshell" and likens three or four sets of ideas to "tip(s) of the iceberg" and feels compelled to finish many nearly unreadable sections of chapters with "in summary." Its largest value is a reflexive one in the sense of the book acting on itself: In the first 50 or so pages, Stanislas Dehaene provides justification enough for speed reading - bypassing the aural part of reading - that one quickly adapts this explanation as a prescription, gradually improving his speed with this book from 300 words/minute to 800 words/minute, as he realizes nothing will be lost.
Even at this incredible speed, a good reader arrives at one essential set of sentences in the book's first third:
Overall, although researchers have managed to map several of the relevant brain areas, how meaning is actually coded in the cortex remains a frustrating issue. The process that allows our neuronal networks to snap together and "make sense" remains utterly mysterious. (p. 111)
There you have it. For each word, the brain takes a large number of dots from the fovea of the eye, reassembles them into a recognizable pattern or "word" then sends a query to its lexicon, retrieving meaning and assigning it to something like a temporary memory space, from which it is linked to other words, forming a sentence. Each words takes less than a tenth of a second. How is this done? Magic!
If a complete understanding of the human brain is a 300-page book, contemporary neuroscience is nearly to the end of its first sentence, and at least 50 years from completing its first paragraph. When compared to a layman's knowledge of their field, scientists like Dehaene appear immensely knowledgeable. When one considers, however, what percentage of their field they've mastered, one comes away with an entirely different view of them.
Most of this book comprises arcane case studies that disprove minutia valued by perhaps a thousand people in the world, or devolves into odd score-settling with those who do not love Charles Darwin. This book will not make you a better reader or help you cure dyslexia, but it might just help you put the wood to a helpless school administrator at your kid's next pool party.
August 26, 2010
This joins the go-to books on my shelf for anyone who cares about how we read and how we learn to do it. It's next to Maryanne Wolf's 'Proust and the Squid' and the already-dated 'Understanding Dyslexia' by Sally Shaywitz.
It's definitely denser matter than the other two, though, and taking it in requires effort. There were a couple of things that made the task harder than it needed to be.
Since 'Reading in the Brain' generally maintains a conversational tone and does not talk down to lay people, since it offers an intriguing and insightful theory of how and why the human brain adapted to what at first appears to be a completely artificial and arbitrary process--since, in other words, I liked it--I'll get my quibbles out of the way first.
I know scientists want to be exact and precise in their language, but for the popular audience it would be ever so helpful if, in describing where things are in the brain, directional words like anterior and dorsal could be replaced with front and upper. Especially since there are so many complicated names of parts that are needed. Appendices or footnotes could alert experts to the writer's competence.
And those part names and mapping them. It sometimes seems that every book on the human brain is filled with muddy black and white diagramming of cloudy cross-sections inconsistently viewed from a variety of angles and taken from a variety of sources.
It would be lovely if Dehaene had used clear color pictures done by one illustrator, with right and left where we usually suppose they are. After all, pictures are intended to make things more understandable. Here, I often became more confused.
OK, I've got that off my chest. Dehaene can be funny, engaging and down-to-earth. He loves puns, quotes Alberto Manguel, and is a guy who says stuff like, 'Literacy drastically changes the brain--literally!' He tries.
'Reading in the Brain' presents a far more complex model for reading than Shaywitz did. At the same time, and this is the most fascinating thing about the book, Dehaene offers a straightforward, beautifully simple hypothesis to explain why our brains can so readily connect to a complicated activity for which evolution cannot have prepared us.
The origins of writing systems--Sumerians counting bushels of grain, for example--are just a tick away on the timeline of human history. When you think about it, reading and writing for the masses have only been around for five hundred years plus. (Thank you, Mr. Gutenberg.) Our brains are hard-wired for hunting and gathering, as well as for helping each other, and for the communication needed to do so. An innate structure for deciphering alphabetic code? Impossible.
Shaywitz and others pointed out that fMRIs show an area in the left, lower, back part of the brain that successful emerging readers use, and unsuccesful readers don't. It's where the distinct individual sounds that make up syllables are broken apart and analyzed. Once that happens, we can assign symbols--little black marks called letters--to those sounds.
That processing is the key, and the reason why whole language doesn't work. To break the code we have to break the code, not absorb it by some kind of osmosis induced through immersion. How and why were our brains able to do that?
Dehaene assigns a perfectly clear name to the back area of the brain that matches articulation to signifier--the letterbox. Then he looks back through evolutionary history, and finds a comparable area in primates that is the basic assembly area for shape recognition. Not just random shapes, but the kind of shapes we see most commonly in nature, like horizontal and vertical lines, half-circles, junctions. You can see where this is going--E's and I's, t's and y's (similar to shapes found in all writing systems).
The question shouldn't be how we adapted to printed text, Dehaene says. It should be how we created a solution to a natural desire--increasing our capacity for knowledge with a tool that allowed us to record language--with the equipment we had. He coins another jargon-free term for this--neuronal recycling.
The equipment we had enabled most of us (there is growing evidence of dysfunction in the letterbox area of dyslexics) to mash together drawing and speech, and then hold onto this relationship between basic shapes and basic sounds long enough to translate a string of markings into words.
Dehaene's hypothesis leads him to all kinds of interesting stuff. For example, we are equipped to recognize objects as they turn. But it is much easier to remember an upside-down tiger than the mirror image of that tiger. Our ancestors needed to instantly identify an erect tiger whether it was coming from the right or left.
Our brains usually don't remember which side Jefferson faces on the nickel. As far as we're concerned, either way it's still a nickel. All children have to 'unlearn' this tendency to ignore reversals in order to learn to read.
On a deeper level, looking more closely at neuronal recycling might help us to better understand other cultural inventions besides literacy. Science. Math. Art. Religion. Given that brain 'structure keeps a tight rein on cultural constructions' doesn't make those constructions any less wonderful. Really, it's all the more amazing.
We are, Dehaene tells us, 'a truly singular species in the cultural sphere' because we have the capability not only to learn, but 'to invent and to transmit cultural objects.' Those sometimes difficult transmissions make our brains struggle to cope with concepts that are not innate. That's a good reason to respect the hard work that children put into learning to read.
Those powerful inventions--like reading--are sublime in their intricacy and ingenuity. That's a good reason to read 'Reading in the Brain.'
It's definitely denser matter than the other two, though, and taking it in requires effort. There were a couple of things that made the task harder than it needed to be.
Since 'Reading in the Brain' generally maintains a conversational tone and does not talk down to lay people, since it offers an intriguing and insightful theory of how and why the human brain adapted to what at first appears to be a completely artificial and arbitrary process--since, in other words, I liked it--I'll get my quibbles out of the way first.
I know scientists want to be exact and precise in their language, but for the popular audience it would be ever so helpful if, in describing where things are in the brain, directional words like anterior and dorsal could be replaced with front and upper. Especially since there are so many complicated names of parts that are needed. Appendices or footnotes could alert experts to the writer's competence.
And those part names and mapping them. It sometimes seems that every book on the human brain is filled with muddy black and white diagramming of cloudy cross-sections inconsistently viewed from a variety of angles and taken from a variety of sources.
It would be lovely if Dehaene had used clear color pictures done by one illustrator, with right and left where we usually suppose they are. After all, pictures are intended to make things more understandable. Here, I often became more confused.
OK, I've got that off my chest. Dehaene can be funny, engaging and down-to-earth. He loves puns, quotes Alberto Manguel, and is a guy who says stuff like, 'Literacy drastically changes the brain--literally!' He tries.
'Reading in the Brain' presents a far more complex model for reading than Shaywitz did. At the same time, and this is the most fascinating thing about the book, Dehaene offers a straightforward, beautifully simple hypothesis to explain why our brains can so readily connect to a complicated activity for which evolution cannot have prepared us.
The origins of writing systems--Sumerians counting bushels of grain, for example--are just a tick away on the timeline of human history. When you think about it, reading and writing for the masses have only been around for five hundred years plus. (Thank you, Mr. Gutenberg.) Our brains are hard-wired for hunting and gathering, as well as for helping each other, and for the communication needed to do so. An innate structure for deciphering alphabetic code? Impossible.
Shaywitz and others pointed out that fMRIs show an area in the left, lower, back part of the brain that successful emerging readers use, and unsuccesful readers don't. It's where the distinct individual sounds that make up syllables are broken apart and analyzed. Once that happens, we can assign symbols--little black marks called letters--to those sounds.
That processing is the key, and the reason why whole language doesn't work. To break the code we have to break the code, not absorb it by some kind of osmosis induced through immersion. How and why were our brains able to do that?
Dehaene assigns a perfectly clear name to the back area of the brain that matches articulation to signifier--the letterbox. Then he looks back through evolutionary history, and finds a comparable area in primates that is the basic assembly area for shape recognition. Not just random shapes, but the kind of shapes we see most commonly in nature, like horizontal and vertical lines, half-circles, junctions. You can see where this is going--E's and I's, t's and y's (similar to shapes found in all writing systems).
The question shouldn't be how we adapted to printed text, Dehaene says. It should be how we created a solution to a natural desire--increasing our capacity for knowledge with a tool that allowed us to record language--with the equipment we had. He coins another jargon-free term for this--neuronal recycling.
The equipment we had enabled most of us (there is growing evidence of dysfunction in the letterbox area of dyslexics) to mash together drawing and speech, and then hold onto this relationship between basic shapes and basic sounds long enough to translate a string of markings into words.
Dehaene's hypothesis leads him to all kinds of interesting stuff. For example, we are equipped to recognize objects as they turn. But it is much easier to remember an upside-down tiger than the mirror image of that tiger. Our ancestors needed to instantly identify an erect tiger whether it was coming from the right or left.
Our brains usually don't remember which side Jefferson faces on the nickel. As far as we're concerned, either way it's still a nickel. All children have to 'unlearn' this tendency to ignore reversals in order to learn to read.
On a deeper level, looking more closely at neuronal recycling might help us to better understand other cultural inventions besides literacy. Science. Math. Art. Religion. Given that brain 'structure keeps a tight rein on cultural constructions' doesn't make those constructions any less wonderful. Really, it's all the more amazing.
We are, Dehaene tells us, 'a truly singular species in the cultural sphere' because we have the capability not only to learn, but 'to invent and to transmit cultural objects.' Those sometimes difficult transmissions make our brains struggle to cope with concepts that are not innate. That's a good reason to respect the hard work that children put into learning to read.
Those powerful inventions--like reading--are sublime in their intricacy and ingenuity. That's a good reason to read 'Reading in the Brain.'
October 13, 2012
I previously read Caplan (Harvard Medical School) in his 1996 book on "Language". He discussed the psychology experiments that revealed that the brain contained 8 different dictionaries, organised conceptually into a tree by speech/text, input/output, and whole-word/grapheme_phoneme.
This model formed the basis of theories on dyslexia.
Now Dehaene updates this psychological model into a neuroscience model, based on functional MRI and other experimental techniques, applied to show brain activities in different areas as words are presented, so that signals encoding them move over time through the different brain areas.
Dehaene is completely convincing, and difficulties in matching model to experimental data are openly discussed. It would be unreasonable to expect a complete model at this stage of research, but so many psychological effects are now explained by inter-area wiring and the apparent functional operation of different brain areas.
For me as an Artificial Intelligence programmer, this book is a "must read". It ought to be also for infant-school teachers, (computational) linguists, speech therapists, carers for seniors, and probably parents of small children, etc.
This model formed the basis of theories on dyslexia.
Now Dehaene updates this psychological model into a neuroscience model, based on functional MRI and other experimental techniques, applied to show brain activities in different areas as words are presented, so that signals encoding them move over time through the different brain areas.
Dehaene is completely convincing, and difficulties in matching model to experimental data are openly discussed. It would be unreasonable to expect a complete model at this stage of research, but so many psychological effects are now explained by inter-area wiring and the apparent functional operation of different brain areas.
For me as an Artificial Intelligence programmer, this book is a "must read". It ought to be also for infant-school teachers, (computational) linguists, speech therapists, carers for seniors, and probably parents of small children, etc.
December 11, 2019
Summary: One of the more comprehensive books about brain science and reading that I have seen. I caught only one area of error, where I think the author is slightly off.
P. 94 - He talk about the "psychological dual route" model. I'm glad to see this as we put it our speed reading course.
P. 109, He talk about how apes do not have the section of the brain that can read. Fascinating.
P. 120 - He talks about the concept of shapes. Young children learning whole world are memorizing shapes... fascinating. It speaks to the idea that we do not really read words letter by letter.
p. 156 - This is where I know he's really not understanding Chinese. He's trying to suggest that the chinese have to learn more characters to get the sounds right. He's just flat out wrong and this is the first place it shows up as wrong. B/c he clearly doesn't read chinese, he uses this example of the Chinese word for horse and how modern Chinese has simplified this character beyond what a kid could understand. What he misses entirely is that most of these characters are still taught via parables. In other words, actually every single chinese kid looks at that character and sees a horse. Only western people who do not learn Chinese that way do not see a horse. Later in the book he speaks more to Japanese, which is NOT AT ALL like Chinese. So his argument just lacks luster. still, the bulk of the book is correct. I think if he were to learn more about Chinese, he could write a second book and also better appreciate a few of his arguments on pictorial languages, which I think he might actually fully appreciate.
P. 159, he again gets it wrong b/c he's trying too hard to make Chinese phonetic. In fact, he is cherry picking words and also, there are tons of words where it would be impossible to figure out which radical carries the sound.
P. 179, fascinating idea that the brain's rewiring for reading actually takes up wiring for other things. He uses the example of animal tracks. I don't actually know if this is true. In my experience, the rewiring was about a different way of pattern recognition. As a result, my associative memory i s so strong it makes up for a lot of other stuff. But I think more work should be done and it's an interesting conversation to have.
P. 189, fascinating that word length does not slow down the reader.
P. 190, we're faster reading lower than upper case. Cool. Also, it speaks to the idea we present as the "visual library." it's faster.
P. 203, he talks about dyslexia and how it impacts the way people register phonetics. But in his case, he's also talking in terms of the idea they can't see it at all given how they are looking at decode the word. Not just that they must learn proper phonetics.
P. 253 - he talks about an issue of mirroring. People have to see letters in the right order. There are examples where he switches it and even though I can read what is meant, it slows me down a lot to read that section. Fascinating.
Tons of great reference in the back and also in the acknowledgements. Great book.
P. 94 - He talk about the "psychological dual route" model. I'm glad to see this as we put it our speed reading course.
P. 109, He talk about how apes do not have the section of the brain that can read. Fascinating.
P. 120 - He talks about the concept of shapes. Young children learning whole world are memorizing shapes... fascinating. It speaks to the idea that we do not really read words letter by letter.
p. 156 - This is where I know he's really not understanding Chinese. He's trying to suggest that the chinese have to learn more characters to get the sounds right. He's just flat out wrong and this is the first place it shows up as wrong. B/c he clearly doesn't read chinese, he uses this example of the Chinese word for horse and how modern Chinese has simplified this character beyond what a kid could understand. What he misses entirely is that most of these characters are still taught via parables. In other words, actually every single chinese kid looks at that character and sees a horse. Only western people who do not learn Chinese that way do not see a horse. Later in the book he speaks more to Japanese, which is NOT AT ALL like Chinese. So his argument just lacks luster. still, the bulk of the book is correct. I think if he were to learn more about Chinese, he could write a second book and also better appreciate a few of his arguments on pictorial languages, which I think he might actually fully appreciate.
P. 159, he again gets it wrong b/c he's trying too hard to make Chinese phonetic. In fact, he is cherry picking words and also, there are tons of words where it would be impossible to figure out which radical carries the sound.
P. 179, fascinating idea that the brain's rewiring for reading actually takes up wiring for other things. He uses the example of animal tracks. I don't actually know if this is true. In my experience, the rewiring was about a different way of pattern recognition. As a result, my associative memory i s so strong it makes up for a lot of other stuff. But I think more work should be done and it's an interesting conversation to have.
P. 189, fascinating that word length does not slow down the reader.
P. 190, we're faster reading lower than upper case. Cool. Also, it speaks to the idea we present as the "visual library." it's faster.
P. 203, he talks about dyslexia and how it impacts the way people register phonetics. But in his case, he's also talking in terms of the idea they can't see it at all given how they are looking at decode the word. Not just that they must learn proper phonetics.
P. 253 - he talks about an issue of mirroring. People have to see letters in the right order. There are examples where he switches it and even though I can read what is meant, it slows me down a lot to read that section. Fascinating.
Tons of great reference in the back and also in the acknowledgements. Great book.
Read
April 3, 2020A fascinating look at how we read and the development of the written word.
December 5, 2021
4,5/5. It was a very dense read! Lot of neurology, brain scans and complexes stuff. Not for newcomers! If you're a neophyte in brain study and neurology don't read it yet, start with more simple read and come back for it later, because it's a good book, but it need some basic knowledge before going into it and you'll have to put in some work as well. But if you do, you'll learn a lot about the brain and the very complexes work that involve learning to read, from the invention of writing/reading to the development of reading in a child brain, something that just quite fascinate me. It wasn't perfect and I have to withdraw half a star because of some repetition and also the, sometimes, overcomplexification of the subject, the subject is complex, but I think at some point, the author could have done a better job making it more accessible.
November 14, 2010
The contents of this review are more of a way for me to remember some the interesting sections of the book than be a means for others to judge the book itself. Please stop reading if you plan to read this book yourself!
Chapter 1:
Only the center of the retina called 'fovea' has a fine enough resolution to read print. This is less than a 15 deg view. Our retinal neurons can only grasp a few words with every pause during a scan - called saccades. While reading we are more capable of ignore scale of the letters, than the change in style of writing (fonts). The visual system can easily ignore differences between eight and EIGHT which are physically quite different, but can amplify the difference between eight and sight which are different by just a few pixels. The mind can easily substitute upper/lower cases.
Morphemes - the smallest independent portion of a compound word 'un''complicate'.
Grapheme - a letter or a series of letters which maps into phoneme in the target language.
The mind has two systems which are active during reading as an adult. The phonological and lexical route. Children start out using the phonological route - i.e. reading out loud (and providing a feedback mechanism to reinforce the sound and meaning of words). But it's been proven that the phonological route is less efficient and slower than the lexical route - i.e. mind directly interprets the meaning of a word visually - bypassing the conversion to sound. Both systems are essential. The phonological route allows us to learn new words until we've read a word sufficient number of times where we no longer need to read the words out loud anymore and we automatically switch over the lexical route over time.
Debate over English: George Bernard Shaw quoted that absurdity of English using the example that 'fish' can also be written as 'ghoti' (gh from the enough, o as in women, ti from lotion). English sits between German/Italian and Chinese in terms of matching symbols to sounds. Italian is one of the easiest language to read because each character can only have one sound, this gives Italian children an edge over English learning kids. Mandrin is a mix of ideographic (symbols representing concepts) and phonetic markers.
The author believe that we need to have a well planned approach to simply English for children, but doesn't endorse sms lingo and advises that having homonyms is actually beneficial for the more efficient lexical path, citing the example that we can easy differentiate the context of the sound 'I' from 'eye', but would've been difficult reading if it were spelt the same. (The hidden logic of our spelling system)
Mental Dictionaries - The mind is an amazing - most adults store an excess of 50,000 words excluding proper nouns and accronyms. Any reader easily retrieves a single meaning of a word from the 50000+ candidate words, in a few tenths of a second, based on a few strokes of light on the retina.
Pandemonium theory: There are thousands of neurons, each storing just a letter or so (and words in clusters). When we read a word, they all get the same signal from the retinal neurons. Each neuron then claims that it knows the letter/word and the highest weight neuron/cluster wins.
Chapter 1:
Only the center of the retina called 'fovea' has a fine enough resolution to read print. This is less than a 15 deg view. Our retinal neurons can only grasp a few words with every pause during a scan - called saccades. While reading we are more capable of ignore scale of the letters, than the change in style of writing (fonts). The visual system can easily ignore differences between eight and EIGHT which are physically quite different, but can amplify the difference between eight and sight which are different by just a few pixels. The mind can easily substitute upper/lower cases.
Morphemes - the smallest independent portion of a compound word 'un''complicate'.
Grapheme - a letter or a series of letters which maps into phoneme in the target language.
The mind has two systems which are active during reading as an adult. The phonological and lexical route. Children start out using the phonological route - i.e. reading out loud (and providing a feedback mechanism to reinforce the sound and meaning of words). But it's been proven that the phonological route is less efficient and slower than the lexical route - i.e. mind directly interprets the meaning of a word visually - bypassing the conversion to sound. Both systems are essential. The phonological route allows us to learn new words until we've read a word sufficient number of times where we no longer need to read the words out loud anymore and we automatically switch over the lexical route over time.
Debate over English: George Bernard Shaw quoted that absurdity of English using the example that 'fish' can also be written as 'ghoti' (gh from the enough, o as in women, ti from lotion). English sits between German/Italian and Chinese in terms of matching symbols to sounds. Italian is one of the easiest language to read because each character can only have one sound, this gives Italian children an edge over English learning kids. Mandrin is a mix of ideographic (symbols representing concepts) and phonetic markers.
The author believe that we need to have a well planned approach to simply English for children, but doesn't endorse sms lingo and advises that having homonyms is actually beneficial for the more efficient lexical path, citing the example that we can easy differentiate the context of the sound 'I' from 'eye', but would've been difficult reading if it were spelt the same. (The hidden logic of our spelling system)
Mental Dictionaries - The mind is an amazing - most adults store an excess of 50,000 words excluding proper nouns and accronyms. Any reader easily retrieves a single meaning of a word from the 50000+ candidate words, in a few tenths of a second, based on a few strokes of light on the retina.
Pandemonium theory: There are thousands of neurons, each storing just a letter or so (and words in clusters). When we read a word, they all get the same signal from the retinal neurons. Each neuron then claims that it knows the letter/word and the highest weight neuron/cluster wins.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 8, 2013
Reading in the Brain is a very challenging book, but the effort, head-scratching, and re-reading was more than worth it - as an educator, neuro-psychology enthusiast, and appreciator of new and and interesting insights into the ways the people work, this book was one of the more significant texts I've read, ever.
From a content perspective, this book wove well-explained data into profound insight into the ways something specific like reading works, which continually built toward much grander and more profound insights into what it means to be human. Dehaene did so very delicately, humbly, yet expertly and convincingly. His ideas of neuronal recycling and what that means to the scope of everything humans have ever invented and are capable of inventing are truly some worldview-altering insights.
As for the more technical aspects of the text, this was very challenging, no doubt, but handled in a way that a reader does not need a deep background in neurology or biology to benefit. That, I think, is another hallmark of a gifted author - accessibility on numerous levels, from highly technical and scientific, to pedagogical, to philosophical, and on. If you are not a neurologist, this book will take some work. But there is definitely something here for you, whether your entry point is basic brain physiology, education, or general interest.
This is the kind of book that should be required reading in college for teachers, perhaps for everyone. Three thumbs up.
From a content perspective, this book wove well-explained data into profound insight into the ways something specific like reading works, which continually built toward much grander and more profound insights into what it means to be human. Dehaene did so very delicately, humbly, yet expertly and convincingly. His ideas of neuronal recycling and what that means to the scope of everything humans have ever invented and are capable of inventing are truly some worldview-altering insights.
As for the more technical aspects of the text, this was very challenging, no doubt, but handled in a way that a reader does not need a deep background in neurology or biology to benefit. That, I think, is another hallmark of a gifted author - accessibility on numerous levels, from highly technical and scientific, to pedagogical, to philosophical, and on. If you are not a neurologist, this book will take some work. But there is definitely something here for you, whether your entry point is basic brain physiology, education, or general interest.
This is the kind of book that should be required reading in college for teachers, perhaps for everyone. Three thumbs up.
March 13, 2020
Best book notes:
"We identify only ten or twelve letters per saccade: three or four to the left of fixation, and seven or eight to the right"
"whole pipeline of mental processes continues to operate for at least one-half second after the word has been presented."
Readlax - Speed Reading App. Train brain, visual span and working memory to read 3x faster. (promo)
"It takes only twenty or thirty milliseconds of word viewing for our brain to automatically activate a word’s spelling, but an additional forty milliseconds for its transformation into sound, as revealed by the emergence of sound-based priming"
"Visual analysis is only the first step in reading. Subsequently, a variety of distinct representations must be brought into contact: the roots of words, their meaning, their sound patterns, their motor articulation schemes. Each of these operations typically demands the simultaneous activation of several separate cortical areas whose connections are not organized in linear chains. All the brain regions operate simultaneously and in tandem, and their messages constantly crisscross each other. All the connections are also bidirectional: when a region A connects to a region B, the converse projection from B to A also exists."
"mental operation like reading"
"only one, the left occipito-temporal region, appeared to play a central and specific role in reading"
"This region is systematically located deep in the left lateral occipito-temporal sulcus"
"Reading is a cognitive, social, and cultural activity that dates back five thousand years"
"What is amazing is that in spite of these vast differences in the way we learned to read, we all call on the same area of the brain to recognize the written word."
"Quite apart from cortical topography, words and faces also have different preferred hemispheres. When we recognize a word, the left hemisphere plays the dominant role. For faces, the right hemisphere is essential."
"A good reader can recognize words regardless of how they are positioned (assuming, of course, that they do not exceed our retina’s limited resolution)."
"First, reading is a sophisticated construction game—a complex cortical assembly line is needed to progressively put together a unique neural code for each written word. Second, conscious reflection is blind to the true complexity of word recognition. Reading is not a direct and effortless process. Rather, it relies on an entire series of unconscious operations."
"Any word we read is initially funneled through the letterbox area, which plays a dominant and universal role in the recognition of writing."
"The lateral temporal region seems to play an essential role in the mediation between the shapes of words and the elements that constitute their meaning. This region can be subdivided into subregions that specialize in different categories of words. Faces, people, animals, tools, vegetables . . ."
"two essential stages in reading: the orthographic filter, which accepts legal letter strings, and the semantic filter, which sorts words according to meaning."
"Pseudo-words or meaningless strings of letters like “trid” or “plosh” that respect the spelling rules of English."
"We recognize the written word using a region that has evolved over time and whose specialty, for the past ten million years or more, has been the visual identification of objects."
"the preferred images that make the neuron fire would become increasingly complex. A small, inclined bar is enough to bring on a significant discharge in the primary visual cortex. More complex curves, shapes, fragments of objects, or even entire objects or faces are, however, needed to trigger neurons at the higher levels."
"neurons would begin to respond to increasingly broader portions of the retina. Each neuron is defined in terms of its receptive field, or the place on the retina to which it responds. The receptive fields broaden by a factor of two or three at each step. This means that the part of the retina to which the preferred object must be presented for the neuron to fire doubles or triples in diameter at each step."
"an increasing degree of invariance is present. Early on, neurons are sensitive to changes in location, size, or lighting of the incoming picture. In higher-level areas, in the move up the hierarchy, neurons tolerate increas..."
"the Japanese neuroscientist Keiji Tanaka made a remarkable discovery: the monkey brain contains a patchwork of neurons dedicated to fragments of shape. Collectively, these primitive shapes constitute a sort of “neuronal alphabet” whose combinations can describe any complex form."
"Perhaps the most striking feature of the inferior temporal neurons is that many of their preferred shapes closely resemble our letters, symbols, or elementary Chinese characters (figures 3.4 and 3.6). Some neurons respond to two superimposed circles forming a figure eight, others react to the conjunction of two bars to form a T, and others prefer an asterisk, a circle, a J, a Y . . . For this reason, I like to call them “proto-letters.”"
"the inferior temporal cortex relies on a stock of geometrical shapes and simple mathematical invariants. We did not invent most of our letter shapes: they lay dormant in our brains for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet."
"Complex objects are recognized through the configurations of their contours. At the places where they join, these contours form reproducible configurations shaped as T, L, Y, or F."
"the capacity to learn is the result of a sophisticated evolutionary process."
"Every child, however, in the first few months of life, quickly learns to recognize faces, voices, native language, and a sense of empathy for others"
"Neurons for Reading ... "
"neurons in the letterbox area recognize written words in less than one-fifth of a second"
"tentative model of the neuronal architecture for reading"
"A hypothetical model of the neuronal hierarchy that supports visual word recognition."
"At each stage, neurons learn to react to a conjunction of responses from the immediately lower level. At the bottom of the pyramid, which is shared by word and image recognition, neurons detect local contrasts and oriented bars. As one climbs further up, neurons become increasingly specialized for reading. They detect letters, letter pairs (bigrams), then morphemes and small words. At each stage, the receptive field broadens by a factor of two or three, while the neuronal ..."
"the well-known fact that the ventral visual system is organized as a hierarchy going from the occipital pole in the back of the brain to the anterior regions of the temporal lobe."
"At the next step, when responses from several neurons tuned to letters are combined, we arrive at neurons sensitive to letter conjunctions. Such neurons, for example, might signal the presence of the letter “N” one or two letters to the left of the letter “A”—a very useful feature if one is to separate similar strings such as “AND” and “DNA.”"
"my colleagues and I have proposed that the most useful letter combination to which neurons should attend is a “bigram”—an ordered pair of letters such as “E left of N.” It is easy to wire a neuron so that it responds selectively to this letter pair but can tolerate some shift in the location of its component letters."
"No one has ever seen bigram neurons. Their existence is the matter of an educated guess, based on what we know about the primate visual system. For the time being, they are a purely theoretical construction that cannot be tested directly with our somewhat rudimentary imaging techniques."
"Grainger and Whitney finally came up with the idea of open bigrams. They noted that words could be encoded not as a list of letters, but as a list of the pairs of letters they contained."
"This similarity explains why we can still read the word “bagde” when two of its letters are inverted."
"Another advantage of the bigram code is that it is insensitive to changes in location and size."
"bigram neurons only fire if the first letter of a pair is less than two letters away from the second."
""
"For instance, a neuron coding for the pair AM can react to the words “ham,” “arm,” and “atom,” but not to “alarm” or “atrium.”"
"morphemes, the smallest linguistic units to have semantic meaning"
"more frequent the bigram, the stronger the activation in the letterbox area"
"We should also bear in mind that eye movements, in the course of reading, always draw the relevant words into a narrow area of the visual field, close to the fovea and mostly to the right of it. When we learn to read, only the neurons that code for these locations are given the opportunity to convert to letter and bigram detectors. Indeed, only words presented at the center of gaze, or slightly to the right of it, and at an angle close to horizontal, are efficiently processed by the ventral occipito-temporal pathway.174 Thus only a limited number of neurons are concerned."
"Reading activates a narrow band of cortex, several centimeters long, extending from the back of the brain to the front of the left occipito-temporal sulcus. Functional subdivisions have now been detected in this strip.175 The neuronal code clearly becomes more abstract as it progresses toward the front of the brain."
"visual word form area occupies a relatively extended strip of cortex, whose back end responds to simple letters while the front responds to complex word"
"If my scenario about innate cortical biases is correct, there is no prewired area for reading, but several genetic biases create a gamut of neuronal preferences for different types of visual stimuli. During reading acquisition, visual word recognition simply lands in the cortical location where neurons are most efficient at this task. In all humans, the intersection of genetic gradients creates a single “sweet spot” for letter strings—the letterbox area."
"In spite of their obvious diversity, all writing systems share numerous visual features—highly contrasted contours, an average number of about three strokes per character, and a reduced lexicon of shapes that constantly recur, even in unrelated cultures."
"most characters are composed of roughly three strokes (curves that can be traced without ever lifting or stopping the pen). Variability around this mean is rather low—our capital letters, for instance, have either one stroke (C, I, J, O, S, U), two strokes (D, G, L, P, Q, T, V, X), three strokes (A, B, F, H, K, N, R, Y, Z), or four strokes (E, M, W), but never more."
"I would like to propose that the magic formula of three strokes per character was chosen by our forefathers because it corresponds to the way in which the neurons’ receptive field increases across the hierarchy of visual areas."
"Corroborating Leroi-Gourhan’s statement, in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), the birthplace of writing, number symbols played an essential role in the emergence of the written code."
"Each of the letters that we routinely use in our Roman alphabet thus contains a small, hidden drawing dating back four thousand years. An “m” symbolizes waves (mem or mayyūma), an “n” is a snake (nahašu), an “l” a goad (lamd), a “k” a hand with outstretched fingers (kaf), an “R” a head (res) . . ."
"Learning to read involves connecting two sets of brain regions that are already present in infancy: the object recognition system and the language circuit. Reading acquisition has three major phases: the pictorial stage, a brief period where children “photograph” a few words; the phonological stage, where they learn to decode graphemes into phonemes; and the orthographic stage, where word recognition becomes fast and automatic."
"At the age of five or six, when children are exposed to their first reading lessons, they already have an expert knowledge of phonology. They also possess a vocabulary of several thousand words, and have mastered the basic grammatical structures"
"In 1985, the British psychologist Uta Frith introduced a model of reading acquisition that has become a classic and distinguishes three main learning stages.221 This is of course a theoretical simplification, since in fact the three stages are not rigidly partitioned."
"Frith’s three simple steps provide a rough outline of the massive changes that occur in the child’s mind. If nothing else, from the standpoint of pedagogy, they provide a very useful description of the child’s learning curve."
"According to Frith, the first reading stage, which occurs around the age of five or six, is “logographic” or “pictorial.” The child has not yet grasped the logic of writing. The visual system attempts to recognize"
"the child’s brain, at this stage, is attempting to map the general shape of words"
"directly onto meanings, without paying attention to individual letters and their pronunciation—a sham form of reading."
"The development of a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion procedure is characteristic of the second stage in reading acquisition, the phonological stage. At this point, whole words cease to be processed. The child learns to attend to smaller constituents such as isolated letters and relevant letter groups (“ch,” “ou,” “ay” . . .). He links graphemes to the corresponding speech sounds and practices assembling them into words. He can now even sound out unfamiliar words."
"The first years of reading instruction lead to the emergence of an explicit representation of speech sounds. The key stage is the discovery that speech is made up of atoms or phonemes, which can be recombined at will to create new words. This competence is called “phonemic awareness.” Studies by the psychologist José Morais have shown that the discovery of phonemes is not automatic. It requires explicit teaching of an alphabetic code.224 Even adults, if illiterate, can fail to detect phonemes in words."
"In the final analysis, the relation between grapheme and phoneme development is probably one of constant reciprocal interaction or “spiral causality.” The acquisition of letters draws attention to speech sounds, the analysis of speech sounds refines the understanding of letters, and so on in a never-ending spiral that leads to the simultaneous emergence of the grapheme and phoneme codes."
"clearest feature of the orthographic stage is that word length gradually ceases to play a role. At the phonological stage, children slowly decipher words sequentially, one letter at a time. As a result, reading time increases with the number of letters in a word. At the orthographic stage, as reading becomes increasingly fluent, this length effect slowly vanishes. It is essentially absent in expert adults—we all read words using a parallel procedure that takes in all letters at once, at least in short words (eight letters or fewer)."
"We identify only ten or twelve letters per saccade: three or four to the left of fixation, and seven or eight to the right"
"whole pipeline of mental processes continues to operate for at least one-half second after the word has been presented."
Readlax - Speed Reading App. Train brain, visual span and working memory to read 3x faster. (promo)
"It takes only twenty or thirty milliseconds of word viewing for our brain to automatically activate a word’s spelling, but an additional forty milliseconds for its transformation into sound, as revealed by the emergence of sound-based priming"
"Visual analysis is only the first step in reading. Subsequently, a variety of distinct representations must be brought into contact: the roots of words, their meaning, their sound patterns, their motor articulation schemes. Each of these operations typically demands the simultaneous activation of several separate cortical areas whose connections are not organized in linear chains. All the brain regions operate simultaneously and in tandem, and their messages constantly crisscross each other. All the connections are also bidirectional: when a region A connects to a region B, the converse projection from B to A also exists."
"mental operation like reading"
"only one, the left occipito-temporal region, appeared to play a central and specific role in reading"
"This region is systematically located deep in the left lateral occipito-temporal sulcus"
"Reading is a cognitive, social, and cultural activity that dates back five thousand years"
"What is amazing is that in spite of these vast differences in the way we learned to read, we all call on the same area of the brain to recognize the written word."
"Quite apart from cortical topography, words and faces also have different preferred hemispheres. When we recognize a word, the left hemisphere plays the dominant role. For faces, the right hemisphere is essential."
"A good reader can recognize words regardless of how they are positioned (assuming, of course, that they do not exceed our retina’s limited resolution)."
"First, reading is a sophisticated construction game—a complex cortical assembly line is needed to progressively put together a unique neural code for each written word. Second, conscious reflection is blind to the true complexity of word recognition. Reading is not a direct and effortless process. Rather, it relies on an entire series of unconscious operations."
"Any word we read is initially funneled through the letterbox area, which plays a dominant and universal role in the recognition of writing."
"The lateral temporal region seems to play an essential role in the mediation between the shapes of words and the elements that constitute their meaning. This region can be subdivided into subregions that specialize in different categories of words. Faces, people, animals, tools, vegetables . . ."
"two essential stages in reading: the orthographic filter, which accepts legal letter strings, and the semantic filter, which sorts words according to meaning."
"Pseudo-words or meaningless strings of letters like “trid” or “plosh” that respect the spelling rules of English."
"We recognize the written word using a region that has evolved over time and whose specialty, for the past ten million years or more, has been the visual identification of objects."
"the preferred images that make the neuron fire would become increasingly complex. A small, inclined bar is enough to bring on a significant discharge in the primary visual cortex. More complex curves, shapes, fragments of objects, or even entire objects or faces are, however, needed to trigger neurons at the higher levels."
"neurons would begin to respond to increasingly broader portions of the retina. Each neuron is defined in terms of its receptive field, or the place on the retina to which it responds. The receptive fields broaden by a factor of two or three at each step. This means that the part of the retina to which the preferred object must be presented for the neuron to fire doubles or triples in diameter at each step."
"an increasing degree of invariance is present. Early on, neurons are sensitive to changes in location, size, or lighting of the incoming picture. In higher-level areas, in the move up the hierarchy, neurons tolerate increas..."
"the Japanese neuroscientist Keiji Tanaka made a remarkable discovery: the monkey brain contains a patchwork of neurons dedicated to fragments of shape. Collectively, these primitive shapes constitute a sort of “neuronal alphabet” whose combinations can describe any complex form."
"Perhaps the most striking feature of the inferior temporal neurons is that many of their preferred shapes closely resemble our letters, symbols, or elementary Chinese characters (figures 3.4 and 3.6). Some neurons respond to two superimposed circles forming a figure eight, others react to the conjunction of two bars to form a T, and others prefer an asterisk, a circle, a J, a Y . . . For this reason, I like to call them “proto-letters.”"
"the inferior temporal cortex relies on a stock of geometrical shapes and simple mathematical invariants. We did not invent most of our letter shapes: they lay dormant in our brains for millions of years, and were merely rediscovered when our species invented writing and the alphabet."
"Complex objects are recognized through the configurations of their contours. At the places where they join, these contours form reproducible configurations shaped as T, L, Y, or F."
"the capacity to learn is the result of a sophisticated evolutionary process."
"Every child, however, in the first few months of life, quickly learns to recognize faces, voices, native language, and a sense of empathy for others"
"Neurons for Reading ... "
"neurons in the letterbox area recognize written words in less than one-fifth of a second"
"tentative model of the neuronal architecture for reading"
"A hypothetical model of the neuronal hierarchy that supports visual word recognition."
"At each stage, neurons learn to react to a conjunction of responses from the immediately lower level. At the bottom of the pyramid, which is shared by word and image recognition, neurons detect local contrasts and oriented bars. As one climbs further up, neurons become increasingly specialized for reading. They detect letters, letter pairs (bigrams), then morphemes and small words. At each stage, the receptive field broadens by a factor of two or three, while the neuronal ..."
"the well-known fact that the ventral visual system is organized as a hierarchy going from the occipital pole in the back of the brain to the anterior regions of the temporal lobe."
"At the next step, when responses from several neurons tuned to letters are combined, we arrive at neurons sensitive to letter conjunctions. Such neurons, for example, might signal the presence of the letter “N” one or two letters to the left of the letter “A”—a very useful feature if one is to separate similar strings such as “AND” and “DNA.”"
"my colleagues and I have proposed that the most useful letter combination to which neurons should attend is a “bigram”—an ordered pair of letters such as “E left of N.” It is easy to wire a neuron so that it responds selectively to this letter pair but can tolerate some shift in the location of its component letters."
"No one has ever seen bigram neurons. Their existence is the matter of an educated guess, based on what we know about the primate visual system. For the time being, they are a purely theoretical construction that cannot be tested directly with our somewhat rudimentary imaging techniques."
"Grainger and Whitney finally came up with the idea of open bigrams. They noted that words could be encoded not as a list of letters, but as a list of the pairs of letters they contained."
"This similarity explains why we can still read the word “bagde” when two of its letters are inverted."
"Another advantage of the bigram code is that it is insensitive to changes in location and size."
"bigram neurons only fire if the first letter of a pair is less than two letters away from the second."
""
"For instance, a neuron coding for the pair AM can react to the words “ham,” “arm,” and “atom,” but not to “alarm” or “atrium.”"
"morphemes, the smallest linguistic units to have semantic meaning"
"more frequent the bigram, the stronger the activation in the letterbox area"
"We should also bear in mind that eye movements, in the course of reading, always draw the relevant words into a narrow area of the visual field, close to the fovea and mostly to the right of it. When we learn to read, only the neurons that code for these locations are given the opportunity to convert to letter and bigram detectors. Indeed, only words presented at the center of gaze, or slightly to the right of it, and at an angle close to horizontal, are efficiently processed by the ventral occipito-temporal pathway.174 Thus only a limited number of neurons are concerned."
"Reading activates a narrow band of cortex, several centimeters long, extending from the back of the brain to the front of the left occipito-temporal sulcus. Functional subdivisions have now been detected in this strip.175 The neuronal code clearly becomes more abstract as it progresses toward the front of the brain."
"visual word form area occupies a relatively extended strip of cortex, whose back end responds to simple letters while the front responds to complex word"
"If my scenario about innate cortical biases is correct, there is no prewired area for reading, but several genetic biases create a gamut of neuronal preferences for different types of visual stimuli. During reading acquisition, visual word recognition simply lands in the cortical location where neurons are most efficient at this task. In all humans, the intersection of genetic gradients creates a single “sweet spot” for letter strings—the letterbox area."
"In spite of their obvious diversity, all writing systems share numerous visual features—highly contrasted contours, an average number of about three strokes per character, and a reduced lexicon of shapes that constantly recur, even in unrelated cultures."
"most characters are composed of roughly three strokes (curves that can be traced without ever lifting or stopping the pen). Variability around this mean is rather low—our capital letters, for instance, have either one stroke (C, I, J, O, S, U), two strokes (D, G, L, P, Q, T, V, X), three strokes (A, B, F, H, K, N, R, Y, Z), or four strokes (E, M, W), but never more."
"I would like to propose that the magic formula of three strokes per character was chosen by our forefathers because it corresponds to the way in which the neurons’ receptive field increases across the hierarchy of visual areas."
"Corroborating Leroi-Gourhan’s statement, in Mesopotamia (present-day Iraq), the birthplace of writing, number symbols played an essential role in the emergence of the written code."
"Each of the letters that we routinely use in our Roman alphabet thus contains a small, hidden drawing dating back four thousand years. An “m” symbolizes waves (mem or mayyūma), an “n” is a snake (nahašu), an “l” a goad (lamd), a “k” a hand with outstretched fingers (kaf), an “R” a head (res) . . ."
"Learning to read involves connecting two sets of brain regions that are already present in infancy: the object recognition system and the language circuit. Reading acquisition has three major phases: the pictorial stage, a brief period where children “photograph” a few words; the phonological stage, where they learn to decode graphemes into phonemes; and the orthographic stage, where word recognition becomes fast and automatic."
"At the age of five or six, when children are exposed to their first reading lessons, they already have an expert knowledge of phonology. They also possess a vocabulary of several thousand words, and have mastered the basic grammatical structures"
"In 1985, the British psychologist Uta Frith introduced a model of reading acquisition that has become a classic and distinguishes three main learning stages.221 This is of course a theoretical simplification, since in fact the three stages are not rigidly partitioned."
"Frith’s three simple steps provide a rough outline of the massive changes that occur in the child’s mind. If nothing else, from the standpoint of pedagogy, they provide a very useful description of the child’s learning curve."
"According to Frith, the first reading stage, which occurs around the age of five or six, is “logographic” or “pictorial.” The child has not yet grasped the logic of writing. The visual system attempts to recognize"
"the child’s brain, at this stage, is attempting to map the general shape of words"
"directly onto meanings, without paying attention to individual letters and their pronunciation—a sham form of reading."
"The development of a grapheme-to-phoneme conversion procedure is characteristic of the second stage in reading acquisition, the phonological stage. At this point, whole words cease to be processed. The child learns to attend to smaller constituents such as isolated letters and relevant letter groups (“ch,” “ou,” “ay” . . .). He links graphemes to the corresponding speech sounds and practices assembling them into words. He can now even sound out unfamiliar words."
"The first years of reading instruction lead to the emergence of an explicit representation of speech sounds. The key stage is the discovery that speech is made up of atoms or phonemes, which can be recombined at will to create new words. This competence is called “phonemic awareness.” Studies by the psychologist José Morais have shown that the discovery of phonemes is not automatic. It requires explicit teaching of an alphabetic code.224 Even adults, if illiterate, can fail to detect phonemes in words."
"In the final analysis, the relation between grapheme and phoneme development is probably one of constant reciprocal interaction or “spiral causality.” The acquisition of letters draws attention to speech sounds, the analysis of speech sounds refines the understanding of letters, and so on in a never-ending spiral that leads to the simultaneous emergence of the grapheme and phoneme codes."
"clearest feature of the orthographic stage is that word length gradually ceases to play a role. At the phonological stage, children slowly decipher words sequentially, one letter at a time. As a result, reading time increases with the number of letters in a word. At the orthographic stage, as reading becomes increasingly fluent, this length effect slowly vanishes. It is essentially absent in expert adults—we all read words using a parallel procedure that takes in all letters at once, at least in short words (eight letters or fewer)."
September 6, 2010
My guess is that this book will only be of interest to people who care a great deal about brain research; it's a jargon-heavy, very detailed analysis of what happens in the brain when we read -- and why we can read at all. We evolved to get quick fixes on shapes in nature, for our survival. So when we moved to farming and larger communities, away from hunting and gathering, and we needed to keep records, we used the same simple shapes we saw in nature -- circles, triangles, stick figures. Letters evolved from those simple shapes, and thus it's not really an accident that reading uses the same part of the brain as shape recognition. The only problem, really, is that the brain takes in these shapes, and rotates them, being indifferent to left and right symmetry, so that we can recognize that tiger no matter how its coming at us. But a "d" and a "b" are mirror images of each other, and so we have to learn to switch off that part of the brain that does that kind of symmetry so well. It's hard, and dyslexics can't do it very well.
There's a whole lot more, but you get the idea. If that's the stuff that dreams are made of for you, you will love this book.
There's a whole lot more, but you get the idea. If that's the stuff that dreams are made of for you, you will love this book.
February 14, 2022
Very interesting and important, a readable and enjoyable book on what is actually a complicated topic - the neuroscience of reading. Reading is a wonder, humans are the only primates with this capability - and it seems to have happened spontaneously and almost by accident in the span of evolution. What does our brain do while we read? Do we lose some other capabilities that other primates still have because we learned how to read? And how come that we are the only primates who have developed culture, which led us to such great inventions and unimaginable progress (for better or worse...)
See also a great video on topic by the author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25GI3...
See also a great video on topic by the author https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25GI3...
April 25, 2018
Meh
Really not much of practical benefit for the classroom teacher, homeschool parent, or a reading tutor to hang their hats on. Lots of scientific jargon and speculation but little useful application for teaching reading. I was pretty disappointed in this book, and even reading it with a group of highly educated dyslexia tutors didn’t yield much that was useful. We already use multi-sensory techniques to teach phonological awareness, phonics, morphology, and comprehension. Overall, it wasn’t worth the time.
Really not much of practical benefit for the classroom teacher, homeschool parent, or a reading tutor to hang their hats on. Lots of scientific jargon and speculation but little useful application for teaching reading. I was pretty disappointed in this book, and even reading it with a group of highly educated dyslexia tutors didn’t yield much that was useful. We already use multi-sensory techniques to teach phonological awareness, phonics, morphology, and comprehension. Overall, it wasn’t worth the time.
September 13, 2016
I loved this book. I found it utterly fascinating, and very well written (I kept marveling that the author's first language is not English. If you're a reader, and you want to find out more about how this mysterious and wonderful process works, I highly recommend this book.
October 30, 2023
Interesting read on the nature and mechanisms of reading. Was startled by the following finding:
"In summary, whether by design or thanks to some extraordinary intuition, the first scribes appear to have been aware, from the beginning, that the shapes they chose should be the easiest to read. Everywhere on the planet, they appear to have settled on characters whose shapes resemble those found in the environment—and are thus easily represented by our brains. This extraordinary regularity fits nicely with the prediction of the neuronal recycling hypothesis. All cultures select signs whose learning requires minimal cortical change. During evolution as well as in the first years of life, our neurons became finely attuned to the characteristic configurations of the environment. Later, writing took the same route. Every time a new system is invented, it converges by trial and error onto the characteristic shapes of “proto-letters” that are already coded deep in the primate’s visual cortex."
"In summary, whether by design or thanks to some extraordinary intuition, the first scribes appear to have been aware, from the beginning, that the shapes they chose should be the easiest to read. Everywhere on the planet, they appear to have settled on characters whose shapes resemble those found in the environment—and are thus easily represented by our brains. This extraordinary regularity fits nicely with the prediction of the neuronal recycling hypothesis. All cultures select signs whose learning requires minimal cortical change. During evolution as well as in the first years of life, our neurons became finely attuned to the characteristic configurations of the environment. Later, writing took the same route. Every time a new system is invented, it converges by trial and error onto the characteristic shapes of “proto-letters” that are already coded deep in the primate’s visual cortex."
January 18, 2021
The act of reading is quite amazing, isn't it?
'Reading is both the result of human evolution and a major actor in its cultural explosion. The expansion of this Cathedral of the Mind, our prefrontal cortex, allowed our species to come up with writing. This invention, in turn, sharpened our mind. It's exercise endowed us with the additional external memory that allowed us, as Francisco de Quevedo put it, to listen to the Dead with our eyes and share the thoughts of past thinkers. In this respect, reading is the first prosthesis of the mind-- a prosthesis that succession of ancient scribes adapted to our primate brain.'
This book gives you a better understanding of how we read, literally. It is how our brain processes the letters on the page. If you want Neurosciencey-linguistic technical talk mixed with pedagogical techniques and suggestions, this is the book for you.
As technical as this book was I thoroughly enjoyed reading what the author had to say about how our brain processes the words on the page. Although I would have liked it to see more practical aspects of the book, I believe it is a beneficial book for educators and parents to understand more about reading in the brain.
There is even a whole chapter on dyslexics, which I suppose would be very useful for anyone who has experienced being dyslexic or knows of another dyslexic person.
I know the goal of this author is that, in due course, research on teaching, Psychology, and Neuroscience will merge into a single, unified science of reading. I have read his other book which came out in 2020 called How We Learn, which ended up on my top 20 books to read list of all time so far. I imagine that Reading in the Brain was a precursor to the idea of writing How We Learn which is a much more approachable book with more practical aspects.
Stanislas is truly an amazing neuroscientist. Just taking this quote for example:
"Reading instruction could become the prime example of genuine Neuro-Psycho-Pedagogy' - an integrated and cumulative approach where teacher autonomy is safeguarded but instruction is aimed toward a pragmatic search for efficient education strategies.
Science can contribute to teaching by introducing Educators to the demanding concept of experimentation. To experiment does not mean to test big ideas picked up at the last minute. It requires patient and meticulous design. Before generating Innovative teaching strategies, all previous sources of knowledge must be tapped. To experiment also implies that any invention be evaluated by comparing it to a controlled situation. A different day, a different exercise, a different classroom. I am confident that experimentation can significantly improve reading instruction. The achievement of this promise, however, will require rigor and attention, not just two recent cognitive discoveries, but also to the vast experience accumulated by teachers - often the prime Experts of reading acquisition."
'Reading is both the result of human evolution and a major actor in its cultural explosion. The expansion of this Cathedral of the Mind, our prefrontal cortex, allowed our species to come up with writing. This invention, in turn, sharpened our mind. It's exercise endowed us with the additional external memory that allowed us, as Francisco de Quevedo put it, to listen to the Dead with our eyes and share the thoughts of past thinkers. In this respect, reading is the first prosthesis of the mind-- a prosthesis that succession of ancient scribes adapted to our primate brain.'
This book gives you a better understanding of how we read, literally. It is how our brain processes the letters on the page. If you want Neurosciencey-linguistic technical talk mixed with pedagogical techniques and suggestions, this is the book for you.
As technical as this book was I thoroughly enjoyed reading what the author had to say about how our brain processes the words on the page. Although I would have liked it to see more practical aspects of the book, I believe it is a beneficial book for educators and parents to understand more about reading in the brain.
There is even a whole chapter on dyslexics, which I suppose would be very useful for anyone who has experienced being dyslexic or knows of another dyslexic person.
I know the goal of this author is that, in due course, research on teaching, Psychology, and Neuroscience will merge into a single, unified science of reading. I have read his other book which came out in 2020 called How We Learn, which ended up on my top 20 books to read list of all time so far. I imagine that Reading in the Brain was a precursor to the idea of writing How We Learn which is a much more approachable book with more practical aspects.
Stanislas is truly an amazing neuroscientist. Just taking this quote for example:
"Reading instruction could become the prime example of genuine Neuro-Psycho-Pedagogy' - an integrated and cumulative approach where teacher autonomy is safeguarded but instruction is aimed toward a pragmatic search for efficient education strategies.
Science can contribute to teaching by introducing Educators to the demanding concept of experimentation. To experiment does not mean to test big ideas picked up at the last minute. It requires patient and meticulous design. Before generating Innovative teaching strategies, all previous sources of knowledge must be tapped. To experiment also implies that any invention be evaluated by comparing it to a controlled situation. A different day, a different exercise, a different classroom. I am confident that experimentation can significantly improve reading instruction. The achievement of this promise, however, will require rigor and attention, not just two recent cognitive discoveries, but also to the vast experience accumulated by teachers - often the prime Experts of reading acquisition."
November 28, 2020
Not my cup of tea. This is well-written, but missing the forest for the leaves on the trees. I thought it would have something interesting to say about teaching reading, but when you finally get to that point in the book, the author says correctly that you can't extrapolate to pedagogical practice from all the theoretical brain science. One could reach the useful conclusions on this topic from the cognitive psychology and educational experiments without any brain blah blah (Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience). So what's the point?
The insights into the evolutionary basis of reading were somewhat interesting but did one need any experiments to say that it had to involve "Recycling" of existing brain structures for a non-natural purpose & inventors of alphabets using symbols that humans can easily recognize? Over my head?
The most interesting tidbit for me was the idea of how reading changes the brain, so for example learning the alphabet increases verbal fluency.
The insights into the evolutionary basis of reading were somewhat interesting but did one need any experiments to say that it had to involve "Recycling" of existing brain structures for a non-natural purpose & inventors of alphabets using symbols that humans can easily recognize? Over my head?
The most interesting tidbit for me was the idea of how reading changes the brain, so for example learning the alphabet increases verbal fluency.
November 28, 2020
Ouch. My brain hurts. This was the hardest book to read that I've finished in years. The writing was difficult, the subject more so. And the subject interfered with reading - it was hard to read something about how we read without immediately trying it out on what I was reading. Even the font was difficult. The author's first language is almost certainly not English and that comes through as well.
And yet, what it had to say about how we read was incredibly fascinating. Whether on AI or on handwriting recognition or speech recognition or on whole language versus phonics (or on teaching reading in general) or on better alphabetic or language design - I expect to see this subject again and again - in fiction and non-fiction, in computer science and medicine.
I highly recommend - but there is a good chance that you will find this book unreadable - but who knows - perhaps I just missed the pre-requisites to make this book easier. 3.5 of 5 (the lowest score of a book I've favorited)
And yet, what it had to say about how we read was incredibly fascinating. Whether on AI or on handwriting recognition or speech recognition or on whole language versus phonics (or on teaching reading in general) or on better alphabetic or language design - I expect to see this subject again and again - in fiction and non-fiction, in computer science and medicine.
I highly recommend - but there is a good chance that you will find this book unreadable - but who knows - perhaps I just missed the pre-requisites to make this book easier. 3.5 of 5 (the lowest score of a book I've favorited)
January 1, 2011
Not what I thought it would be.
VERY technical and difficult book written for scientists and medical types.
Bottom line - what goes on in your brain while you read is un-freaking-believable.
I just saved you 10 hours of misery.
VERY technical and difficult book written for scientists and medical types.
Bottom line - what goes on in your brain while you read is un-freaking-believable.
I just saved you 10 hours of misery.
May 21, 2011
Interesting. Not quite the book I was hoping for, and a bit dry at times, but pretty interesting. That is all.
July 30, 2012
If I knew more about neuroscience I would have loved this, but as it was I had to skip a lot of the dense parts and just read the simple summaries to understand a lot of it.
May 19, 2023
dehaene's primary argument here
revolves around the notion
of "neuronal recycling",
which is a fancy way to re-conceptualize
the plasticity of the brain:
neurological bits designed for one thing
(ie. to recognize particular shapes
in nature for survival) have been "recycled"
via evolution to accomplish new tasks
(ie. to recognize particular shapes,
agreed upon within a culture, that convey
spoken language visually - aka reading).
we were never born to read,
and dehaene is quite clear
we were NOT designed to read either,
but we fumbled our way into reading
so successfully that we now take it for granted.
the fact that we read at all should be considered
miraculous -- even dehaene, i believe,
would use that term for it.
my primary take-away here,
as an avid reader and a teacher of adults,
is that we never outgrow the need
for further instruction about word parts,
particularly the phonological and morphological
components that allow for new levels
of decoding and vocabulary expansion.
this book, for me, often felt like an exercise
in the newness of language.
dehaene ends on a chapter i hope
he will explore with a new book
regarding the "culture of neurons"
and "cerebral modules" that
inherently (though surely not by Design!)
draw us to natural science, math, art,
even religion. i'm fascinated by the need
to explain our shared Divine DNA
as anything other than the Imago Dei.
and dehaene profoundly has that need.
bless his heart.
revolves around the notion
of "neuronal recycling",
which is a fancy way to re-conceptualize
the plasticity of the brain:
neurological bits designed for one thing
(ie. to recognize particular shapes
in nature for survival) have been "recycled"
via evolution to accomplish new tasks
(ie. to recognize particular shapes,
agreed upon within a culture, that convey
spoken language visually - aka reading).
we were never born to read,
and dehaene is quite clear
we were NOT designed to read either,
but we fumbled our way into reading
so successfully that we now take it for granted.
the fact that we read at all should be considered
miraculous -- even dehaene, i believe,
would use that term for it.
my primary take-away here,
as an avid reader and a teacher of adults,
is that we never outgrow the need
for further instruction about word parts,
particularly the phonological and morphological
components that allow for new levels
of decoding and vocabulary expansion.
this book, for me, often felt like an exercise
in the newness of language.
dehaene ends on a chapter i hope
he will explore with a new book
regarding the "culture of neurons"
and "cerebral modules" that
inherently (though surely not by Design!)
draw us to natural science, math, art,
even religion. i'm fascinated by the need
to explain our shared Divine DNA
as anything other than the Imago Dei.
and dehaene profoundly has that need.
bless his heart.
January 23, 2021
3.5. The author thoroughly cites numerous scientific research studies, and relates the research to history, language and modern society. While I enjoyed reading this book, I kept on waiting for the chapters on ways to directly apply the research - however, it wasn’t addressed. This book was interesting, but to enjoy this book you need to have a solid scientific background.
April 1, 2021
Fairly good treatment of the reading brain. Nice addition to the neuroscience behind our remarkle ability to speak to the dead across ages aka reading. Good stuff. I like it but Maryanne Woolf's is the standard to compare it to. If you can pick up "Proust and the Squid" on the same topic.
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