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Introduction The New Science of Reading 1
From Neurons to Education 2
Putting Neurons into Culture 3
The Mystery of the Reading Ape 4
Biological Unity and Cultural Diversity 6
A Reader's Guide 7
Chapter 1 How Do We Read? 11
The Eye: A Poor Scanner 13
The Search for Invariants 18
Amplifying Differences 21
Every Word Is a Tree 21
The Silent Voice 25
The Limits of Sound 29
The Hidden Logic of Our Spelling System 31
The Impossible Dream of Transparent Spelling 34
Two Routes for Reading 38
Mental Dictionaries 41
An Assembly of Daemons 42
Parallel Reading 46
Active Letter Decoding 47
Conspiracy and Competition in Reading 49
From Behavior to Brain Mechanisms 51
Chapter 2 The Brains Letterbox 53
Joseph-Jules Déjerine's Discovery 54
Pure Alexia 57
A Lesion Revealed 58
Modern Lesion Analysis 61
Decoding the Reading Brain 65
Reading Is Universal 69
A Patchwork of Visual Preferences 72
How Fast Do We Read? 76
Electrodes in the Brain 78
Position Invariance 82
Subliminal Reading 88
How Culture Fashions the Brain 93
The Brains of Chinese Readers 97
Japanese and Its Two Scripts 98
Beyond the Letterbox 100
Sound and Meaning 104
From Spelling to Sound 107
Avenues to Meaning 109
A Cerebral Tidal Bore 113
Brain Limits on Cultural Diversity 116
Reading and Evolution 119
Chapter 3 The Reading Ape 121
Of Monkeys and Men 123
Neurons for Objects 125
Grandmother Cells 129
An Alphabet in the Monkey Brain 133
Proto-Letters 137
The Acquisition of Shape 141
The Learning Instinct 142
Neuronal Recycling 144
Birth of a Culture 148
Neurons for Reading 150
Bigram Neurons 153
A Neuronal Word Tree 158
How Many Neurons for Reading? 160
Simulating the Reader's Cortex 163
Cortical Biases That Shape Reading 164
Chapter 4 Inventing Reading 171
The Universal Features of Writing Systems 173
A Golden Section for Writing Systems 176
Artificial Signs and Natural Shapes 178
Prehistoric Precursors of Writing 180
From Counting to Writing 182
The Limits of Pictography 184
The Alphabet: A Great Leap Forward 190
Vowels: The Mothers of Reading 192
Chapter 5 Learning to Read 195
The Birth of a Future Reader 197
Three Steps for Reading 199
Becoming Aware of Phonemes 200
Graphemes and Phonemes: A Chicken and Egg Problem 202
The Orthographic Stage 204
The Brain of a Young Reader 204
The Illiterate Brain 208
What Does Reading Make Us Lose? 210
When Letters Have Colors 215
From Neuroscience to Education 218
Reading Wars 219
The Myth of Whole-Word Reading 222
The Inefficiency of the Whole-Language Approach 225
A Few Suggestions for Educators 228
Chapter 6 The Dyslexic Brain 235
What Is Dyslexia? 237
Phonological Trouble 238
The Biological Unity of Dyslexia 243
A Prime Suspect: The Left Temporal Lobe 246
Neuronal Migrations 249
The Dyslexic Mouse 251
The Genetics of Dyslexia 253
Overcoming Dyslexia 256
Chapter 7 Reading and Symmetry 263
When Animals Mix Left and Right 267
Evolution and Symmetry 269
Symmetry Perception and Brain Symmetry 270
Dr. Orton's Modern Followers 274
The Pros and Cons of a Symmetrical Brain 276
Single-Neuron Symmetry 277
Symmetrical Connections 280
Dormant Symmetry 284
Breaking the Mirror 288
Broken Symmetry ... or Hidden Symmetry? 289
Symmetry, Reading, and Neuronal Recycling 293
A Surprising Case of Mirror Dyslexia 294
Chapter 8 Toward a Culture of Neurons 301
Resolving the Reading Paradox 303
The Universality of Cultural Forms 304
Neuronal Recycling and Cerebral Modules 306
Toward a List of Cultural Invariants 308
Why Are We the Only Cultural Species? 312
Uniquely Human Plasticity? 314
Reading Other Minds 315
A Global Neuronal Workspace 317
Conclusion The Future of Reading 325
Acknowledgments 329
Notes 331
Bibliography 346
Index 376
Figure Credits 387
I was fascinated by this book, since I am a reader, and a neurologist. The brain contains pathways that are specialized for recognizing letter shapes, and for associating the sounds of words with the letter shapes. This could not have evolved in the past 3000 years; it is scripts that have been adjusted to take advantage of the wiring patterns in the brains originally specialized for recognizing 3 dimensional objects. The author is a neuroscientist specializing in neuro-imaging and reading. He makes a very good case against whole language methods of teaching reading and in favor of phonics methods. He explores the field of dyslexia, and explores other areas of brain function that might have borrowed evolved neuronal pathways. There are practioners of neuroethics and neuroesthetics. His concept is that the human brain ultimately is better at reshaping itself in response to stimuli than that of other species.
2 out of 2 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.Anonymous
Posted February 19, 2010
Perhaps the previous reviewer a) does not have properly taught/developed reading skills and strategies, or b) has reading comprehension deficits.
0 out of 1 people found this review helpful.
Was this review helpful? Yes NoThank you for your feedback. Report this reviewThank you, this review has been flagged.JimKay
Posted December 26, 2009
This author makes a lot of different claims about how reading works and gives various samples of text so you can see for yourself. What I saw was that almost nothing worked the way he then told me it had. Something is fundamentally wrong with this book and its claims.
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Overview
"Brings together the cognitive, the cultural, and the neurological in an elegant, compelling narrative. A revelatory work."-Oliver Sacks, M.D.
The act of reading is so easily taken for granted that we forget what an astounding feat it is. How can a few black marks on white paper evoke an entire universe of meanings? It's even more amazing when we consider that we read using a primate brain that evolved to serve an entirely different purpose. In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene explores every aspect of this human invention, from its origins to its neural underpinnings. A world authority on the subject, ...