Posted: Feb 22, 2021 12:36 pm
1. Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition – Sophia S.A. Marmaridou
2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
320 pp.
Appropriately enough for this thread, an investigation into how the brain goes about the task of reading. Wolf reminds us that spoken language is part of our genetic heritage, but there is no gene for reading.
Instead, the reading faculty bootstraps on other aspects of our brain architecture -visual, phonological, limbic, and short and long term memory, and over the course of a fairly intensive educational effort creates a reading brain.
It was mentioned in book 5 above and stated again here that the brain of a reader is structurally different from the brain of a person who has never learned to read. (E.g. the Corpus Callosum which connects the hemispheres of the brain is thicker in readers.)
Wolf intersperses the neuroscience with personal and anecdotal passages on her own reading life and quotes extensively from great writers on what it means to be a reader, describing how the act of reading is dialogic, between the reader and the text and also between the reader and him/herself.
There is also an extensive section on the spectrum of traits that we label as dyslexia. Given the different parts of the brain that have to coordinate to do reading, it is not surprising that different brain architecture in any one of the modules involved can lead to difficulty in reading. What surprised me, but made sense in retrospect, was that dyslexia can be manifested differently in different languages. Because of the often loose connection between spelling and pronunciation in English, a differently structured phonological faculty in the brains of English readers may manifest itself as reading difficulty. In languages that have a more regular letter-sound correspondence the same structured phonological module has to work less against the stream and reading will pose less of a problem. In languages like Chinese, it is visual pattern recognition parts of the brain that may be wired differently that cause reading problems. All very interesting. The Author notes that many famous and accomplished people have been dyslexic and that the wiring of the brain that interferes with learning to read may have benefits in other cognitive domains.
Wolf closes with some thoughts on how the digital age is fundamentally altering what it means to be a reader. Given the plasticity of the human brain, it is bound to be an interesting journey.
2. Fire and Fury: The Allied Bombing of Germany and Japan - Randall Hansen
3. Cognitive Exploration of Language and Linguistics – René Dirven and Marjolijn Verspoor (Eds.)
4. Age of Static: How TV Explains Modern Britain – Phil Harrison
5. The Secret of Our Success: How Culture is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating our Species and Making us Smarter – Joseph Henrich
6. Heroic Failure and the British - Stephanie Barczewski
7. Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain - Maryanne Wolf
320 pp.
Appropriately enough for this thread, an investigation into how the brain goes about the task of reading. Wolf reminds us that spoken language is part of our genetic heritage, but there is no gene for reading.
Instead, the reading faculty bootstraps on other aspects of our brain architecture -visual, phonological, limbic, and short and long term memory, and over the course of a fairly intensive educational effort creates a reading brain.
It was mentioned in book 5 above and stated again here that the brain of a reader is structurally different from the brain of a person who has never learned to read. (E.g. the Corpus Callosum which connects the hemispheres of the brain is thicker in readers.)
Wolf intersperses the neuroscience with personal and anecdotal passages on her own reading life and quotes extensively from great writers on what it means to be a reader, describing how the act of reading is dialogic, between the reader and the text and also between the reader and him/herself.
There is also an extensive section on the spectrum of traits that we label as dyslexia. Given the different parts of the brain that have to coordinate to do reading, it is not surprising that different brain architecture in any one of the modules involved can lead to difficulty in reading. What surprised me, but made sense in retrospect, was that dyslexia can be manifested differently in different languages. Because of the often loose connection between spelling and pronunciation in English, a differently structured phonological faculty in the brains of English readers may manifest itself as reading difficulty. In languages that have a more regular letter-sound correspondence the same structured phonological module has to work less against the stream and reading will pose less of a problem. In languages like Chinese, it is visual pattern recognition parts of the brain that may be wired differently that cause reading problems. All very interesting. The Author notes that many famous and accomplished people have been dyslexic and that the wiring of the brain that interferes with learning to read may have benefits in other cognitive domains.
Wolf closes with some thoughts on how the digital age is fundamentally altering what it means to be a reader. Given the plasticity of the human brain, it is bound to be an interesting journey.