Dehaene; Reading in the Brain
Book	Page		Topic
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	1		Some reading areas (diagram)
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	1		The reader's brain contains a complicated set of mechanisms admirably attuned to reading.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	1		Advances in psychology and neuroscience over the last 20 years have begun to unravel the principles underlying the brains reading circuits.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	1		Brain imaging methods now reveal, in just a matter of minutes, the brain areas that activate when we decipher written words.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	1		Scientists can now track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain of processing stages, each of which is marked by an elementary question: Are these letters? What do they look like? Are they a word? What does it sound like? How is it pronounced? What does it mean?		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	2		A continually developing theory of reading postulates that the brain circuitry inherited from our primate evolution can be co-opted to the task of recognizing printed words.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	2		Our neuronal networks are literally "recycled" for reading.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	2		The insight into how literacy changes the brain is profoundly transforming our vision of education and learning disabilities.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	2		New remedial programs are being conceived that should, in time, cope with the debilitating incapacity to decipher words known as dyslexia.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	3		It is now clear that the dyslexic brain is subtly different from the brain of a normal reader.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	4		The literate brain contains specialized cortical mechanisms that are exquisitely tuned to the recognition of written words.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	4		The human mechanisms for reading are systematically housed in a brain regions as though they were as a cerebral organ for reading.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	4		Writing was born only 5400 years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and the alphabet itself is only 3800 years old.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	4		Evolution did not have time to develop specialized reading circuits in Homo sapiens.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	4		Our brain is built on the genetic blueprint that allowed our hunter gatherer ancestors to survive.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	4		Reading uses a primate brain originally designed for life in African savanna.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	4		Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	4		Brain imaging demonstrates that the adult brain contains fixed circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	5		All sorts of imperfection attests that evolution is not guided by an intelligent creator, but follows random paths in the struggle for survival.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	6		Cerebral circuits for reading demonstrate that the brain is adaptable to culture.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	7		Part of our visual system is not hardwired, but remains open to changes induced by the environment.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	7		Within an otherwise well structured brain,    visual plasticity gave the ancient scribes the opportunity to invent reading.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	7		Cultural acquisition arrives on the fringe of brain plasticity.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	7		Our brain adapts to a given culture by minimally turning its predispositions to a different use.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	7		When we learn a new skill,    we'll recycle some of our old primate brain circuits, in so far as those circuits can tolerate the change.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	8		Our brain was not designed for reading,    but recycles some of its circuits    for this novel cultural activity.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	9		The uniqueness of our species may arise from a combination of two factors --   (1) a theory of mind (the ability to imagine the mind of others)    and (2) a conscious global workspace (an internal buffer where the infinite variety of ideas can be recombined).		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	9		Mechanisms inscribed in our genes conspire to make us the only cultural species.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	10		Reading, although a recent invention,    lay dormant for millennia within the envelope of potentialities    inscribed in our brains.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	30		English is an abominably irregular language.		20
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	30		Irregularities of English spelling.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	31		In the Italian language,    every letter maps into a single phoneme,    with virtually no exceptions.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	31		English spelling could be simplified.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	31		English spelling failed to evolve    in spite of the natural drift of oral language.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	32		English language contains many more speech sounds than Italian.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	32		The number of English phonemes ranges from 40 to 45,    depending on speakers and counting methods,    while Italian has only 30.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	32		Vowels and diphthongs are particularly abundant in English.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	32		Languages with a great many phonemes, such as English and French.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	33		Turkey in the space of one year (1928-29)    adopted the Roman alphabet,    drastically simplified its spelling,    and taught 3 million people how to read.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	38		All writing systems    oscillate between an accurate representation of sound    and a fast transmission of meaning.		5
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	38		Two information processing pathways in the brain coexist and supplement each other while we read.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	39		Word reading proceeds along several parallel processing routes. (diagram)		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	40		Two quite distinct pathways for reading --    (1) direct route,    from letters to words and their meaning,    (2) indirect route,    from letters to sounds    and from sounds to meanings.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	40		Fluent reading relies on the close knit coordination of the two reading routes.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	41		Mental Dictionaries		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	41		As proficient readers, we all possess a lexicon of English spelling that lists the written forms of all the words we know from the past.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	41		Orthographic memories of word spellings are probably stored in the form of hierarchical trees    of letters,    graphemes,    syllables,    and morphemes.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	41		We also maintain a separate "phonological lexicon,"    a mental dictionary    of the pronunciation of words.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	41		We also have a grammatical store that specifies words as a noun,    that its plural is regular, etc.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	41		Each word is associated with dozens of semantic features    that specify its meaning.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	42		A standard dictionary has about 100,000 entries, and any English speaker knows about 40,000 or 50,000 of them.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	42		Any reader easily retrieves a single meaning of at least 50,000 candidate words, in the space of a few tenths of a second, based on nothing more than a few strokes of light on the retina.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	44		The human brain is the archetype of a massively parallel system where all neurons compute simultaneously.		2
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	49		Word decoding does not proceed in a strictly sequential manner,    and the time needed to read a word    is not related to the number of letters that it contains.		5
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	49		Studies of human reading suggests that the reader's brain behaves much like a mental Senate.    The recognition of a word    requires multiple cerebral systems    to agree on an ambiguous interpretation of the visual input.    The time that it takes to read a word    depends primarily on the conflicts and conditions that it sets into motion in the cortical architecture.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	49		Experimental psychologists have discovered that conflicts can occur at all levels of word processing.    Within the lexicon, words have been shown to compete against their neighbors, or with words that are so similar that they have all but one letter in common.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	49		Experiments show that the relative frequency of a word's neighbors plays a crucial role in the time it takes us to recognize it.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	51		Reading can be broken down into a sequence of information processing stages. From information processing in the retina     to invariant letter recognition,    access to pronunciation,    morpheme recognition,    all the way up to conflict resolution within the lexicon,    the efficiency of the human mechanism for reading is impressive.		2
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	51		The parallel processing of all of a word's characters, the resolution of ambiguities, the immediate access to one out of perhaps 50,000 words in a mental lexicon, all point to the remarkable adaptation of our brain to the task of reading.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	51		How can our brain be so well adapted to a problem for which he could not possibly have evolved?		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	51		There is a specific cortical area for written words, much like the primary auditory cortex area or the motor cortex.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	53		The Brain's Letterbox		2
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	58		The human brain contains specific reading areas that transmit information about the identity of a letter string to the brain's language regions.		5
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	59		After a stroke, a patient can lose the ability to read and thus become alexic. (diagram)		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	61		Early stages of visual analysis are not unique to reading, but contribute to the visual recognition of any shape, color, or object.		2
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	62		The critical site for pure alexia lies a few centimeters to the front of the occipital pole, on the bottom side of the left hemisphere.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	62		Anatomists call the area for pure alexia the left occipito-temporal area, because it lies at the boundary of the occipital and temporal lobes of the brain, within a groove in the cortical mantle called the lateral occipito-temporal sulcus.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	62		In this book that critical site for pure alexia will be referred to as the "brain's letterbox," a term that expresses what the authors believe the region does.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	62		The brain's letterbox area plays a crucial role in the fast identification of the letter string and its transmission to the higher areas that compute pronunciation and meaning.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	62		The visual recognition of the letters rests primarily in a distinct "letterbox" area on the brain's lower side.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	62		Three ways for lesions to prevent normal function of the visual cortical form area -- (1) disruption by direct lesion, (2) disconnected upstream and thus deprived of visual inputs, (3) disconnected downstream so it cannot send outgoing messages to other brain regions.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	64		Written words enter occipital pole in the form of visual patterns, and are then sent to the angular gyrus to make contact with the visual images of words, then propagated to Wernicke's area, the seat of auditory images for words, then on the Broca's area, where articulation patterns are retrieved, and finally to the motor cortex, which controls muscles.		2
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	64		All the brain's regions operate simultaneously and in tandem, and their messages constantly crisscross each other. All the connections are bidirectional.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	65		Even though we have a number of imaging tools for the brain, we are still unable to assign precise functions to each region, because they all operate simultaneously and interact with each other at fast speeds.		1
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	65		It is unclear if scientists will ever fully understand the reader's brain,    and achieve an intuitive grasp on so much complex circuitry.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain	65		The brain's visual input area occupies a strategic location and is a funnel through which all visual information about written words seemed to flow before all of it is distributed to a great variety of left hemispheric areas.		0
Dehaene; Reading in the Brain