Reading in the Brain Quotes

“Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision. Yet brain imaging demonstrates that the adult brain contains fixed circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading.”
― Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

“In the midst of many cultural treasures, reading is by far the finest gem—it embodies a second inheritance system that we are duty-bound to transmit to coming generations.”
― Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

“written text is not a high-fidelity recording. Its goal is not to reproduce speech as we pronounce it, but rather to code it at a level abstract enough to allow the reader to quickly retrieve its meaning.”
― Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

“The uniqueness of our species may arise from a combination of two factors: a theory of mind (the ability to imagine the mind of others) and a conscious global workspace (an internal buffer where an infinite variety of ideas can be recombined).”
― Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

“Time was simply too short for evolution to design specialized reading circuits.”
― Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

“Time was simply too short for evolution to design specialized reading circuits. How, then, did our primate learn to read?”
― Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

“Emperor Huang Di, around 2600 BC, one of his ministers, Cang Jie, decided that the footprints left in the dirt by various bird species constituted a small set of easily recognizable shapes—and he used them to create the first Chinese characters.”
― Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention