Status Updates From Reading in the Brain: The S...

I would like to emphasize to families with dyslexic children that genetics is not a life sentence. The brain is a “plastic” organ…

According to [Franck] Ramus, only the phonological deficit provides a causal link to reading deficits. Even if the additional impairments contribute to dyslexia as a medical syndrome, they do not belong to the causal core that lies at the origins of reading difficulties.

Teaching methods based on a whole-language approach are systematically less efficient than phonics. Performance is best when children are, from the beginning, directly taught the mapping of letters onto speech sounds. Regardless of their social background, children who do not learn letters and graphemes suffer from reading delays.

Studies by the psychologist José Morais have shown that the discovery of phonemes is not automatic. It requires explicit teaching of an alphabetic code. Even adults, if illiterate, can fail to detect phonemes in words.

Cultural evolution, through trial and error and a progressive selection across many generations, arrived at a small inventory of minimal and universal letter shapes. Although they can vary from one country to the next, they all originate in the same set of basic features that are present in natural scenes and that our visual system grasps most easily.

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.

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.

Our writing systems changed under the constraint that even a primate brain had to find them easy to acquire.

shapes that resemble Western letters,such as T,F,Y,O,were adopted by inferior temporal neurons because they collectively formed an optimal code,invariant to image transformations,and whose combinations could represent an infinity of objects
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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

Chapter 2 was a real tour de force. Lots of studies, brain images, brain science terminology but the author was able to deliver the gist of the message.

In the final analysis, all these findings lean toward a fundamental universality of reading circuits. In spite of the diversity of writing systems and transcription rules, people the world over, by and large, solicit the same brain areas when they read.

For the letterbox area, therefore, the letters “G” and “g” are as similar as “O” and “o”—a clear proof that this region has adapted to the conventions of our alphabet. That neurons respond in the same way to the shapes “g” and “G” cannot be attributed to an innate organization of vision. It necessarily results from a learning process that has incorporated cultural practices into the appropriate brain networks.

That the location of this brain activation is identical in every human brain may seem uncanny.
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Furthermore, our individual command of reading varies greatly from person to person, depending on how we learned to read.
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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.

Studies of human reading suggest that the reader’s brain behaves much like a mental senate. The recognition of a word requires multiple cerebral systems to agree on an unambiguous interpretation of this visual input. The time that it takes us to read a word thus depends primarily on the conflicts and coalitions that it sets into motion in our cortical architecture.

That’s funny…

English is an abominably irregular language. George Bernard Shaw pointed out that the word “fish” might be spelled ghoti: gh as in “enough,” o as in “women,” and ti as in “lotion”!

At any rate, as long as text is presented in pages and lines, acquisition through gaze will slow reading and impose an unavoidable limitation. Thus, fast reading methods that advertise gains in reading speed of up to one thousand words per minute or more must be viewed with skepticism.

My purpose in this book is to share my knowledge of recent and little-known advances in the science of reading. In the twenty-first century, the average person still has a better idea of how a car works than of the inner functioning of his own brain—a curious and shocking state of affairs.