Reading in the Brain

Reading in the Brain

Something is going on inside your skull right now that is translating irregular shapes into meaningful letters, words and sentences. What is it? As Stanislas Dehaene shows in Reading in the Brain, our minds harbor a sophisticated set of mechanisms admirably attuned to the task. Here he shares cutting-edge insights from neuroscience that offer an intriguing new perspective on how it happened.

We begin with a puzzle: Writing was born only 5,400 years ago, far too short a time for humans to have evolved specialized reading circuits from scratch. So how can we read? Here Dehaene proposes what he calls the “neuronal recycling” hypothesis: Part of our brains’ visual processing system—which evolved very long ago—is not hardwired, but retains a degree of plasticity that allows it to interpret symbols as well as images. In these pages, Dehaene shows how neuronal recycling can account for literacy and its mechanisms in the brain.

The book begins with a look at how our visual systems collect information from the printed page. We then see how a specific sector of the brain—Dehaene dubs it “the brain’s letterbox”—extracts the identity of a string of letters in less than one-fifth of a second and transmits it to areas in the temporal and frontal lobes that encode sound pattern and meaning. Later on, the book explains how our brains house neurons that respond to visual stimuli that mirror letter shapes such as “T”, “Y” and “L”—the root of our ability to read text. Dehaene goes on to suggest that early scribes invented letter systems that fitted the organization of our brains: “Writing,” he argues, “evolved to fit the cortex.” How do children learn to read? What explains dyslexia? And why are we the only species that has learned to read? These are among the additional questions we cover.

Reading in the Brain opens our eyes to the mechanics of a ubiquitous human activity.

Hardcover: 400 pages

Publisher: Viking Penguin ( November 12, 2009 )

Item #: 76-3182

ISBN: 9780670021109

Product Dimensions: 6.0 x 9.0 x 0.0 inches

Product Weight: 21.0 ounces