Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention

By: Stanislaus Dehaene

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Synopsis: "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." -Publishers Weekly

Book Quality:: Excellent
Book Size:: 388 Pages
ISBN-13:: 9780670021109
Publisher:: Viking
Date of Addition:: 02/05/10
Copyrighted By:: Stanislas Dehaene
Adult content:: No
Language:: English
Has Image Descriptions:: No
Categories:: Nonfiction, Science, Health, Mind and Body, Psychology, Education
Submitted By:: Daproim Africa
Proofread By:: Daproim Africa
Usage Restrictions:: This is a copyrighted book.