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

French scientist Stanislas Dehaene is a world authority on the cognitive neuroscience of language and number processing in the human brain. He is the director of the Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, a professor of experimental cognitive psychology at the Collège de France, a member of the French Academy of Sciences and of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences. He is the author of several books, including The Number Sense. In 2008 he was profiled in The New Yorker for his work in numerical cognition.

A renowned cognitive neuroscientist's fascinating and highly informative account of how the brain acquires reading

How can a few black marks on a white page evoke an entire universe of sounds and meanings? In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene provides an accessible account of the brain circuitry of reading and explores what he calls the "reading paradox": Our cortex is the product of millions of years of evolution in a world without writing, so how did it adapt to recognize words? Reading in the Brain describes pioneering research on how we process language, revealing the hidden logic of spelling and the existence of powerful unconscious mechanisms for decoding words of any size, case, or font.

Dehaene's research will fascinate not only readers interested in science and culture, but also educators concerned with debates on how we learn to read, and who wrestle with pathologies such as dyslexia. Like Steven Pinker, Dehaene argues that the mind is not a blank slate: Writing systems across all cultures rely on the same brain circuits, and reading is only possible insofar as it fits within the limits of a primate brain. Setting cutting-edge science in the context of cultural debate, Reading in the Brain is an unparalleled guide to a uniquely human ability.

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.

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

Ch. 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

Ch. 2 The Brain's Letterbox 53

Joseph-Jules Dejerine'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

Ch. 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 Neuronsfor Reading? 160

Simulating the Reader's Cortex 163

Cortical Biases That Shape Reading 164

Ch. 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

Ch. 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

Ch. 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

Ch. 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

Ch. 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