Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read

Author Dehaene, who has some very impressive credentials, has made an exhaustive exploration of how the human brain reads. What he has concluded is that we ‘recycle’ parts of the brain that were evolved to do other things. Humans have been evolving for several million years, but only reading

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for a few thousand- a new structure just for reading couldn’t have been created in that time. And reading arose in several geographical areas around the same time- the chances of a special mutation for reading happening in all those places is pretty slim.

Hundreds of experiments, from EEGs, fMRIs, split brain surgeries, tests on people who have had strokes or other brain damage, have found how reading works. From how the eye functions, to the recognition of letters on paper, to turning them mentally into sound, and putting those sounds together into words, Dehaene has traced the path. He gives his opinions on what seem to be the best way to teach reading, but also calls for large experiments in teaching reading to resolve, once and for all, what is the best, most efficient way to teach all- not just average children but adult illiterates and people with dyslexia.

The book is very interesting, but it can be slow going. He gives the conditions and results of test after test, and tells us what the information gained tells us about reading. What the reader learns about their brain makes it worth sticking with the book.

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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.

Every page has something new and informative, although there is a little too much repitition of certain points. One of my fondest hopes is that someday what is called "literary criticism" will refer to examination of how an author is able to subtly manipulate neural circuitry through orthography,

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as opposed to the centuries of arid bloviation about historicism or deconstruction or the "liberal tradition" that is currently the domain of the English Department.

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In this book, Stanislas Dehaene sets out to answer this question: how is it that the human brain can read printed material so easily, although not enough time has passed between the invention of writing and now to allow our brains to evolve? His answer: neuronal recycling. The brain adapts neuronal

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circuits originally designed for one purpose to the new one: reading.
Along the way, Professor Dehaene discusses such fascinating material as the invention of writing, brain imaging of people as they read, and what is it about the human brain that allows us to create a culture. Written in an engaging style and loaded with case studies, this is a wonderful book for anyone who has ever wondered what exactly is going on in his brain while he reads. Professor Dehaene also provides some insights into reading methods for teachers and into dyslexia for concerned parents.

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A very interesting, but incredibly long-winded account of almost everything that scientists have learned about the how the brain performs the human-unique task of reading. It was a relief that, in the last chapter of the book, the author acknowledges that the book is very long-winded (so he

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shouldn’t be too offended by the first sentence). However if you enjoy reading, you will most likely tolerate the great minutia covered for the insight and understanding that the book provides. The explanation of dyslexia was informative (it is not simply that Dyslexic reverse letters or words). An interesting aside was the discussion of why it is unlikely that spelling of the English language could be usefully simplified. Scientists have determined that a specific part of the brain is responsible for identifying letters and for permitting reading. From that, the author then asks how this could be, given that reading developed over a period of time too short to be explained by evolution. A natural question is whether the learning to read sacrificing some other ability (e.g. the ability to “read” tracks as in Hunter/Gather society). It seems that this question has not been answered, and the authors discussion here was less complete than everywhere else.
A very good book. Well worth the time spent reading it.

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Stanislas Dehaene describes in detail the neuronal architecture of the brain that enables us to read. I was struck by the fact that reaading begins with the recognition of graphemes and phonemes, and the brain rapidly builds a picture of the word that includes matching both the whole written word

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and the spoken word with the target word.

Clearly written for lay people, this book opened up for me exciting new information.

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Notes so far:

Generic "he". Ugh. Come on, people, it's the 21st century.

From the intro: "Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision." So, is he arguing that sign language is as amazing a thing as reading? Checking the index, he doesn't address sign language

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anywhere.

Didn't end up having time to finish before it had to go back to the library; I'll give it a try later when I have more time and when I'm willing to put up with the generic "he". (The problem with generic "he" in a book like this is that, unless you believe men's brains and women's brains are identical, it's confusing whether "his brain/a man's brain" means that X is true of a male brain and not a female brain, or X is true of all human brains. Using gender-neutral constructions can be more challenging writing but results in more accurate communication.)

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In 2009, French cognitive neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene proposed in his book Reading in the Brain a hypothesis to describe brain activity in humans when they read. He calls it neuronal recycling, and it’s based on a few elementary facts.

Writing systems and reading have been around for only

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about 5,000 years, much too short a timeframe for humans to evolve brain structures tailored specifically to reading. So, obviously, humans did not evolve reading as a skill. Dehaene’s thesis is based on MRIs of peoples’ brains while they read, and research into the anatomy of primate brains. In chimpanzee and macaque brain structures, neurologists have learned that synapses within the occipital and inferior temporal areas fire when the subject is shown certain shapes.

Dehaene has also found the analagous areas in human brains in use while a person is reading. In simple terms, the author’s hypothesis states that reading “hijacks” these brain structures evolved to recognize certain critical shapes and directed their use to recognizing letters and words. From there, writing systems have adapted to take advantage of some apparently pre-programmed, or evolved, primate brain functions. The result is a literate population who can communicate in great detail with the dead, and can leave communications for future generations after they themselves are dead. It’s obviously a superpower.

A survey of writing systems through the last few thousand years revealed some intriguing parallels. For instance, most characters are composed of roughly three strokes that can be traced without ever lifting or stopping the pen or stylus. Dehaene proposes that this formula corresponds to the way the neurons’ react to increasing complexity of the symbols. In all writing systems across the world, characters appear to have evolved to an almost optimal combination that can easily be grasped the multi-tiered way the brain works as we read. At lower levels of our visual comprehending system, the strokes themselves consist of two, three or four line segments. At one level up, in our alphabetical systems, multiletter units such as word roots, prefixes, suffixes, and grammatical endings are almost invariably two, three, or four letters long. In Chinese, most characters consist in a combination of two, three, or four semantic and phonetic subunits. Visually speaking, all writing systems seem to rely on a pyramid of shapes whose golden section is the number 3 plus or minus 1.

I confess there are chapters in this book I did not read. They were very technical, written for other neuroscientists, covering dyslexia and the implications for the teaching of reading. The level of detail here is deep and comprehensive. The style is straightforward and clear, comprehensible to any adult reader. I did get the diverting feeling as I read, as I’m sure Dehaene did while writing, that readers of his book had to engage in this marvelous, unique skill, while learning about the marvelous, unique skill they were using. Quite enjoyable.

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Very insightful