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The Barnes & Noble Review - Jonah Lehrer

Right now, your mind is performing an astonishing feat. Photons are bouncing off these black squiggles and lines -- the letters in this sentence -- and colliding with a thin wall of flesh at the back of your eyeball. The photons contain just enough energy to activate sensory neurons, each of which is responsible for a particular plot of visual space on the page. The end result is that, as you stare at the letters, they become more than mere marks on a page. You've begun to read.

Seeing the letters, of course, is just the start of the reading process. As the neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene reveals in his fascinating Reading in the Brain, the real wonder is what happens next. Although our eyes are focused on the letters, we quickly learn to ignore them. Instead, we perceive whole words, chunks of meaning. (The irregularities of English require such flexibility. As George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, the word "fish" could also be spelled ghoti, assuming that we used the gh from "enough," the o from "women," and the ti from "lotion.") In fact, once we become proficient at reading, the precise shape of the letters -- not to mention the arbitrariness of the spelling -- doesn't even matter, which is why we read word, WORD, and WoRd the same way.

In this clearly written summary of the field, Dehaene is primarily interested in two separate mysteries. The first mystery is how the individual human brain learns to read. What changes take place inside our head between kindergarten and second grade, when most of us start to take literacy for granted? How do we go from sounding out syllables, carefully parsing the phonetics of each word, to becoming fluent readers? And how does this incredibly complicated act become automatic, so that evn ths sntnce cn b quikly undrstd?

Dehaene begins by introducing the reader to the "letterbox area," a small bit of brain just behind the left ear. The crucial role of this cortical part was first revealed by Mr. C, a 19th-century neurological patient who, after a mild stroke, lost the ability to read. What made Mr. C's case so peculiar is that his vision was perfectly fine; he could make sense of objects and faces and even numbers. However, when he opened up a book or glanced at a newspaper, the letters on the page were utterly inscrutable, a mess of inchoate lines and curves. "He [Mr.C] thinks that he has lost his mind," his doctor dryly noted.

Subsequent studies of patients with pure alexia -- they can see everything but written language -- have located the specific contours of the letterbox area. Not surprisingly, it takes up a significant chunk of our visual cortex, as the invention of the alphabet seems to have usurped brain cells previously devoted to object recognition. (Dehaene refers to this process as "neuronal recycling.") He also speculates that, while "learning to read induces massive cognitive gains," it also comes with a hidden mental cost: because so much of our visual cortex is now devoted to literacy, we're less able to "read" the details of natural world.

But reading isn't just about seeing -- we still have to imbue those syllabic sounds with meaning. This is why, once the letterbox area deciphers the word -- this takes less than 150 milliseconds -- the information is immediately sent to other brain areas, which help us interpret the semantic content. Such a complex act requires a variety of brain areas scattered across both hemispheres, all of which must work together to make sense of a sentence. If any of these particular areas are damaged, people tend to lose specific elements of language, such as the ability to conjugate verbs or decipher metaphors.

One of the most intriguing findings of this new science of reading is that the literate brain actually has two distinct pathways for reading. One pathway is direct and efficient, and accounts for the vast majority of reading comprehension -- we see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word's meaning. However, there's also a second pathway, which we use whenever we encounter a rare and obscure word that isn't in our mental dictionary. As a result, we're forced to decipher the sound of the word before we can make a guess about its definition, which requires a second or two of conscious effort.

The second major mystery explored by Dehaene is how reading came to exist. It's a mystery that's only deepened by the recency of literacy: the first alphabets were invented less than 4,000 years ago, appearing near the Sinai Peninsula. (Egyptian hieroglyphic characters were used to represent a Semitic language.) This means that our brain wasn't "designed" for reading; we haven't had time to evolve a purpose-built set of circuits for letters and words. As Deheane eloquently notes, "Our cortex did not specifically evolve for writing. Rather, writing evolved to fit the cortex."

Deheane goes on to provide a wealth of evidence showing this cultural evolution in action, as written language tweaked itself until it became ubiquitous. In fact, even the shape of letters -- their odd graphic design -- has been molded by the habits and constraints of our perceptual system. For instance, the neuroscientists Marc Changizi and Shinsuke Shimojo have demonstrated that the vast majority of characters in 115 different writing systems are composed of three distinct strokes, which likely reflect the sensory limitations of cells in the retina. (As Dehaene observes, "The world over, characters appear to have evolved an almost optimal combination that can easily be grasped by a single neuron.") The moral is that our cultural forms reflect the biological form of the brain; the details of language are largely a biological accident.

Deheane ends the book with a discussion of education -- he's a supporter of phonics and ridicules the whole-language method, "which does not fit with the architecture of our visual brain." It's an interesting chapter, and it's always nice to see scientists grapple with the practical implications of their work, but the most compelling themes of the book remain rooted in basic science. As Deheane and others have demonstrated, the brain is much more than the seat of the soul -- it's also the fleshy source of our culture. By studying the wet stuff inside our head, we can begin to understand why this sentence has this structure, and why this letter, this one right here, has its shape. --Jonah Lehrer

Jonah Lehrer is a BN Review contributor.

The Washington Post - Susan Okie

In this fascinating and scholarly book, French neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene explains what scientists now know about how the human brain performs the feat of reading, and what made this astonishing cultural invention biologically possible.

The New York Times - Alison Gopnik

[Stanislas Dehaene's] gifts, on display in Reading in the Brain, include an aptitude for complex experiments and an appetite for detail. This makes for excellent science but not, paradoxically, easy reading. Still, his book will repay careful study

Publishers Weekly

The transparent and automatic feat of reading comprehension disguises an intricate biological effort, ably analyzed in this fascinating study. Drawing on scads of brain-imaging studies, case histories of stroke victims and ingenious cognitive psychology experiments, cognitive neuroscientist Dehaene (The Number Sense) diagrams the neural machinery that translates marks on paper into language, sound and meaning. It's a complex and surprising circuitry, both specific, in that it is housed in parts of the cortex that perform specific processing tasks, and puzzlingly abstract. (The brain, Dehaene hypothesizes, registers words mainly as collections of pairs of letters.) The author proposes reading as an example of “neuronal recycling”—the recruitment of previously evolved neural circuits to accomplish cultural innovations—and uses this idea to explore how ancient scribes shaped writing systems around the brain's potential and limitations. (He likewise attacks modern “whole language” reading pedagogy as an unnatural imposition on a brain attuned to learning by phonics.) This lively, lucid treatise proves once again that Dehaene is one of our most gifted expositors of science; he makes the workings of the mind less mysterious, but no less miraculous. Illus. (Nov. 16)

Library Journal

What's behind the invention of reading? Well, for starters, brain plasticity, the evolution of neurocircuits capable of processing visual with audio information, and the expansion of the prefrontal cortex leading to a behavior described as consciousness. The evolutionary infusion of these elements along with a novel hijacking from their evolved use intersects with human culture and incites a revolution: a culture with texts and brains that read those texts. All this drives neuroscientist Dehaene's (experimental cognitive psychology, Collège de France) thesis that the invention of reading has less to do with constructs, such as alphabets, words, and sentence structures, than the mechanics and limits of our brains. Simply, our brains didn't evolve to read, but they are flexible enough to learn new tricks. Dehaene supports his thesis with references to a smorgasbord of research, traversing such subjects as anatomy, reading mechanics, primate evolution, history of linguistics, literacy, dyslexia, and brain symmetry. VERDICT This will appeal to a broad audience interested in the cognitive sciences, reading, and linguistics. Some chapters will attract those who teach reading and languages and parents of children with reading disabilities.—Scott Vieira, Johnson Cty. Lib., KS\

Kirkus Reviews

A neuroscientist explains how the brain deals with reading. Dehaene (Experimental Cognitive Psychology/College de France; The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness, 2002, etc.) begins by pointing out that the brain contains circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading. Humans began to read only 5,000 years ago, so eons of evolution could not have designed it. Since genes haven't evolved to enable us to read, writing systems have adapted to constraints in the human brain. The author describes experiments using dazzling, high-tech devices that image the brain while a subject reads. The retina sends everything we see to the extensive visual areas at the rear of the brain. An instant later, any written word, in any language, lights up a tiny area. Closer examination of this "letterbox area" reveals a smaller section sensitive only to simple lines and curves, an adjacent area that forms these into letters and another that recognizes words. This is the identical area and mechanism which animals use to recognize objects in their environment, so evolution has cleverly recycled existing brain circuits to handle reading. Dehaene stresses that these findings should help teach reading-phonics trump the whole word method, which has no basis in brain physiology-and treat dyslexia, which is rare in "transparent" languages (i.e., where one letter equals one sound) like Italian but epidemic in English where irregular spelling makes it much harder for the brain to decode words. Dense with ideas and experiments, but richly rewarding for readers willing to put in the effort.

What People Are Saying

In a moment when knowledge about the reading brain may be the key to its preservation, Stanislas Dehaene's book provides the next critical rung of that knowledge. He does this through insights gained from his own prolific research, through his comprehensive grasp of the neurosciences, and through his unique combination of common sense and wisdom that shines through every chapter. (Maryanne Wolf, author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain)

What People Are Saying

Stanislas Dehaene takes us on a journey into the science of reading. We travel past firing neurons in monkeys, brain activation patterns in humans, people with brain damage, and culture as a whole. It's a proactive and enjoyable synthesis of a tremendous amount of information, with just the right balance between getting the facts right and making them accessible to lay readers. (Joseph LeDoux, University Professsor NYU, author of Synaptic Self and The Emotional Brain.)

What People Are Saying

Reading in the Brain isn't just about reading. It comes nearer than anything I have encountered to explaining how humans think, and does so with a simple elegance that can be grasped by scientists and nonscientists alike. Dehaene provides insight about the neurological underpinnings of the spectacular cognitive skills that characterize our species. Students of human evolution are not the only ones who will find Reading in the Brain fascinating. Parents, educators, and anyone else who nurtures the intellectual development of children cannot afford to ignore Dehaene's observations about the best methods for teaching them to read! (Dean Falk, author of Finding our Tongues: Mothers, Infants, and the Origins of Language)

What People Are Saying

We are fortunate that Stanislas Dehaene, the leading authority on the neuroscience of language, is also a beautiful writer. His READING IN THE BRAIN brings together the cognitive, the cultural, and the neurological in an elegant, compelling narrative. It is a revelatory work.

What People Are Saying

The complicated partnership of eye and mind that transforms printed symbols into sound, music, and meaning, and gives rise to thought, is the subject of this intriguing study. It's a wondrous journey: like that of stout Cortez, like H.M. Stanley's search for Dr. David Livingstone, like the next stunning probe into outer space. (Howard Engel, co-author of The Man Who Forgot How to Read)

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents