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

Dehaene describes how an area of the temporal cortex processes the written word. This so called 'letterbox' of the brain is situated within the left ventral visual area. All information about written words passes through this, and it is located in the same area whatever the language of the subjects. The brain is seen as dividing its visual work into categories, with each performed by a different patch of the cortex. Many of the preferred shapes of the 'letterbox' neurons are shapes that resemble letters, symbols or Chinese characters; these are collectively referred to as proto-letters. These may have evolved to help identify objects by being invariant to changes in images. With letters, whatever the type of font, size or colour of the letters, our interpretation does not change. The 'letterbox' is located between an area of the cortex that recognises landscapes and buildings and another that recognises faces. Thus the ventral surface of the brain contains areas tuned to recognising particular types of feature. However, the specialisation of such areas overlaps. Specialisation seems to be at the level of neurons, with neurons of different specialisations intermingled. Visual analysis in reading is followed by extraction of sound patterns and meaning. Nerve fibres project from the 'letterbox' towards other parts of the temporal cortex. At their destinations, separate networks appear to be involved in processing sound and meaning. The left-middle and ventral regions of the left temporal lobe are thought to be specialised in processing meaning. The lateral temporal region appears to be subdivided into regions dealing with the meaning of particular words. Regions near the front of the temporal lobe appear to concentrate on the meanings of words when combined into sentences. It is suggested that areas such as this act as convergence zones for information from the rest of the brain. Something that evolves for one purpose can get taken over for another. Literacy is seen as changing the brain with both an increase in left brain engagement and an increase in activity between the two hemispheres. The 'letterbox' was originally evolved for something else, so reading may be paid for by some offsetting cognitive loss. The only serious criticism of the book is that this interesting question is not tackled in greater depth.

Twenty years ago I read Caplan, "Language", which reveals the multiple whole-word and grapheme/phoneme dictionaries for input/output, speech and writing, that the brain contains. These had been demonstrated by experiments in Cognitive Psychology. This, and other books on psycholinguistics, provided a refreshing new outlook, compared to my more mathematical studies of typed feature structure grammars like Stanford's Lingo, which are profoundly Chomskyan. In AI, Charniak's book claimed that Chomskyan approaches would not deliver results in computer analysis of language, and recommended a statistical approach. The "garden path" sentences beloved of phsycholinguists, like "The horse raced past the barn fell" also suggest that collocations or "n-grams", weighted statistically by their frequency, also play a large part in language understanding. I liked Jackendoff's two recent books, which in contrast to Chomsky, suggested a multi-level approach with morphology at the bottom, and ontologies at the top, in which each level exchanges information with levels above and below. From a mathematical perspective, this points to a constraint-based approach in which the whole system settles to a solution that is optimal across all levels. The book by Dehaene plugs into these various approaches without even referencing them, so I assume the author has arrived at his conclusions independently via neuroscience theories and experimentation. The various dictionaries described by Caplan seem to become emergent structures formed from the letter-pairs that Dehaene demonstrates are stored in the brain. Any sort of pairings suggest statistically weighted collocations as being a fundamental component, and Dehaene also demonstrates how the various levels of Jackendoff's models map onto distinct brain regions. Dehaene is a "must-read". I heard about it on the "Brain Science Podcast" which I recommend to anyone interested in neuroscience.

This is a fascinating resume of the latest research into how we are able to read. If you want to understand what happens in the human mind when we read and what happens when reading goes wrong, this book provides many insights. It comes from a very Scientific angle and some of the sections are quite dense and detailed.

Dehaene demystifies the cultural act of reading and shows, with neuroimaging evidence, that the human brain has to adapt each time when it learns to read and to make sense of the symbols. He also shows that the whole word reading fashion is likely to have caused major problems for young children and that sounds have to be linked to their written counterpart phonemically. The chapter on dyslexia is a must for teachers, parents and therapists

This is a very accessible book which explains all the new science behind the skill of reading, and more specifically reading an alphabetic writing system.

Wish I had read it years ago. It has changed my thinking, although the ideas and scientific thinking were new to me the pedagogy it related to was not.

Very well-written work giving even non-specialists insights into modern research into the working of the human brain. It indicates approaches to teaching and learning even beyond reading and writing.

The book should be read by all primary school teachers. I like the way the author links the sound and letters of the language with neuronal recycling, modular activities of the brain and global neuronal work space which is related to consciousness

It is a thrilling read for those interested! The book carefully & scientifically describes the miracle of how we are able to read, and many of the variations in our abilities. It is a milestone contribution on how best to LEARN to read. It is a bit dated at this point. Still an excellent basis for learning more in detail and in neurobiological terms. I learned SO much!

I've read this book in Portuguese in 2014 when I was concluding my paper on graduation. It changed completely changed my view about reading (and also of how my paper was being done). Stanislas is a well-respected scientist, especially on the studies of dyslexia.

This is an amazing science book which sheds light about how our brain works to synthesize the anatomy and physiology of reading ....

Read it, read it again and then read it again. With every read, I get a bit more out of it, understand more nuances and attach more bookmarks.

Thank you