Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read"Brings together the cognitive, the cultural, and the neurological in an elegant, compelling narrative. A revelatory work."--Oliver Sacks, M.D. The act of reading is so easily taken for granted that we forget what an astounding feat it is. How can a few black marks on white paper evoke an entire universe of meanings? It's even more amazing when we consider that we read using a primate brain that evolved to serve an entirely different purpose. In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene, author of How We Learn, explores every aspect of this human invention, from its origins to its neural underpinnings. A world authority on the subject, Dehaene reveals the hidden logic of spelling, describes pioneering research on hiw we process languages, and takes us into a new appreciation of the brain and its wondrous capacity to adapt. |
Contents
INTRODUCTION | 1 |
A Readers Guide | 7 |
A Poor Scanner | 13 |
Amplifying Differences | 21 |
The Limits of Sound | 29 |
Two Routes for Reading | 38 |
Parallel Reading | 46 |
The Brains Letterbox | 53 |
CHAPTER 4 | 171 |
CHAPTER 5 | 195 |
A Chicken and Egg Problem | 202 |
The Illiterate Brain | 208 |
When Letters Have Colors | 215 |
CHAPTER 6 | 235 |
The Biological Unity of Dyslexia | 243 |
Neuronal Migrations | 249 |
Modern Lesion Analysis | 61 |
Reading Is Universal | 69 |
How Fast Do We Read? | 76 |
Position Invariance | 82 |
Subliminal Reading | 88 |
The Brains of Chinese Readers | 97 |
Sound and Meaning | 104 |
A Cerebral Tidal Bore | 113 |
Reading and Evolution | 119 |
Neurons for Objects | 125 |
An Alphabet in the Monkey Brain | 133 |
The Acquisition of Shape | 141 |
Overcoming Dyslexia | 256 |
CHAPTER 7 | 263 |
Toward a Culture of Neurons | 301 |
Toward a List of Cultural Invariants | 308 |
Uniquely Human Plasticity? | 314 |
CONCLUSION | 323 |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | 329 |
| 346 | |
| 376 | |
FIGURE CREDITS | 387 |
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Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention Stanislas Dehaene No preview available - 2009 |
Common terms and phrases
adapted alphabet animal auditory bigram brain activity brain areas brain imaging Broca's area cerebral child circuits cognitive Cohen connections consonant corpus callosum cortical cultural decoding deficit Dehaene Déjerine detectors dyslexia dyslexic encoded English evolution faces figure fMRI frontal functional MRI genes graphemes gyrus human brain hypothesis impairment inferior temporal inferior temporal cortex input instance invariance invention Kanji language learn to read left and right left hemisphere left occipito-temporal lesion letter strings letterbox area lexicon magnetoencephalography meaning mechanisms mental milliseconds mirror image monkey morphemes neural neuronal recycling Neuroscience normal object occipital occipital pole occipito-temporal region patients phonemes phonological primate processing pronunciation readers reading acquisition receptive fields recognize respond retina right hemisphere role route shapes spatial specific speech sounds spelling symmetry temporal cortex temporal lobe temporal region tion Valdois ventral visual areas visual cortex visual system whole-language word recognition writing systems written words