For Understanding What You Read Which Part of Brain Works
You tin find the original commodity highlighted here - or many others like it - published at Frontiers for Young Minds. (Kassuba T and Kastner S (2015) The Reading Brain. Front Immature Minds. 3:5. doi: 10.3389/frym.2015.00005)
Do you savor reading books? Reading is one of the unique activities that only humans do, and we take not been doing it for that long! People have been practicing oral communication using a language organisation with grammatical rules for at least 100,000 years. Nosotros take been edifice tools for even longer, with the beginning stone tools dating dorsum near 2.5 million years [ane ]. But we have been reading and writing just for a few chiliad years!
Writing was invented in Southern Mesopotamia, or present-twenty-four hours Iraq, past the Babylonians around 5,400 years ago (Figures 1 and 2) [2 ]. Back then, only a few people could read and write. Present, these skills are taught in schools and are accessible to a lot of us. All the same, there are still many people in the world – children and adults alike – who never had the adventure to learn to read and write. Not knowing how to read or write is chosen illiteracy. Today, about 1 in every 10 people on our planet cannot read or write. That ways almost 800 million of us are illiterate!
Effigy 1 - Timeline of linguistic communication development. Reading and writing are relatively new abilities of the human species: while we have been using tools for more than than 2.v meg years, we accept merely started communicating with each other near half a meg yeas ago. The use of systematic languages post-obit grammatical rules that we employ to talk to each other started only well-nigh a hundred thousand years ago, and reading and writing simply started in the final few one thousand years!
Figure 2 - A. Sumerian cuneiform tablet, ca. 3100-2900 B.C. Writing, and thus reading, was invented about 5,400 years ago in Mesopotamia (nowadays-day Republic of iraq), where this clay tablet is from. Early writing was used primarily to tape and store data pertaining to the trading of goods. Signs were drawn with a reed as a writing utensil on pillow-shaped tablets, most of which were only a few inches broad. The reed left small marks in the clay which nosotros call cuneiform, or wedge-shaped, writing. This tablet nearly likely documents grain distributed by a large temple. The seal impression depicts a male figure guiding two dogs on a leash and hunting or herding boars in a marsh environment (image from The Metropolitan Museum of Fine art, Purchase, Raymond and Beverly Sackler Gift, 1988, www.metmuseum.org. http://metmuseum.org/Collections/search-the-collections/329081). B. Globe showing the approximate location of Mesopotamia in present-day Iraq. Adapted from Google Earth, https://www.google.com/earth/.
What happens in our encephalon when nosotros learn to read?
The Wordbox in Our Brain
Nearly a 3rd of our encephalon is specialized in analyzing things that we see. This part of the brain is too known as the visual organization. This system is based in the cortex, the folded surface of the brain. Areas of the visual system lie in occipital cortex (cherry in Figure iii) and parts of temporal (yellow) and parietal (green) cortices.
Figure 3 - The wordbox in our brain. The upper function of the paradigm shows the left half of the brain, also called the left hemisphere, in a view from the side. The lower part of the image shows that aforementioned left hemisphere from a lesser view. The cortex (the folded surface) of the human brain is divided into four parts: the occipital cortex (red), the temporal cortex (xanthous), the parietal cortex (green), and the frontal cortex (blue). Things that we run into are analyzed in the visual system located in the occipital cortex (marked with an eye icon) and in parts of the temporal and parietal cortices. The human brain has developed regions that are specialized for language information. Words we speak or comprehend are processed in the regions marked with orange ovals. The wordbox or visual word form area used for recognizing the shapes of words nosotros look at is marked by the purple oval. It can only exist seen when looking at the brain from the bottom. The dashed purple oval marks where this area would be if you lot could see it from the side. The wordbox acts as a translator between our visual organisation and our language regions.
Other parts of the brain aid us sympathize and produce language (to speak). These parts are located more often than not in the left hemisphere, or the left half of the brain. Regions for agreement language are establish in left temporal cortex, and regions for producing linguistic communication are constitute in left frontal cortex (Effigy iii). When we read, both the visual system and the linguistic communication regions are involved: The visual arrangement examines what the words wait like, and the language regions tell us what they mean.
A 3rd part of the encephalon links the visual system and the linguistic communication regions together. We will call this region the wordbox, merely it is as well known equally visual discussion form area (Figure iii) [iii ]. This surface area of the brain translates visual shape information (what words look similar: a cord of round symbols with directly lines) into meaningful information that our linguistic communication regions tin sympathise and further work with. Basically, the wordbox is a brain region that is specialized in knowing what written words look similar.
Is the wordbox already in our brain when we are born or is information technology just there later on we larn how to read? And do illiterate people (who cannot read) have it?
How the Wordbox Develops in the Brain
How does the encephalon build a wordbox? Before you lot learned to read, you didn't know that words and messages were symbols for audio – your brain just saw them as squiggly shapes. An "O" has a round shape. And so does an orange or a basketball. Shapes of any sort are stored in a region of the encephalon called the object cortex, which is part of the temporal cortex in the visual organisation (Figure 4A). This region tin can tell an O, an orange, or a basketball game apart, even though they all have similar circular shapes. The object cortex also provides information most the purpose and meaning of different things in the world: you eat an orange but not a letter or a basketball!
Thanks to the object cortex, we can besides recognize different shapes and objects no affair how we await at them. For case, nosotros can recognize a basketball game hoop from afar when inbound the gym or from close by when standing directly underneath. Even if the hoop were turned upside down, we would still know what information technology was (Figure 4B)! Our object cortex identifies it every bit the same hoop at all times.
However, call up near the alphabetic character "d." The same shape flipped is a "b" or turned upside-down a "q." In all of these cases the shape stays the same, but once we learn the alphabet, the pregnant and apply of the letter changes. Our visual system has to be very precise about recognizing a "d" as a "d" and not turning it accidentally into a "b" or a "q."
When we outset start learning to read, the wordbox develops from the object cortex and is still able to recognize the same shapes from all viewpoints – you can write reversed, yous are able to read upside-downward, and and so on (Effigy 5). Over time, the wordbox learns that the guild of letters is important because information technology defines words – for case, "pat" and "tap" mean unlike things (Figure 4B). That is why information technology is important to always read English from left to right and not from right to left!
The wordbox learns what words typically look like and information technology starts to follow rules that go on with a given language, similar the example of reading from left to right. The wordbox is a region in the encephalon that develops equally we larn to read, and it gets trained to recognize shapes that expect like words. It recognizes messages and shapes precisely every bit they appear and in which sequence they happen to occur with other letters (Figure 4C) [iv ]. While the object cortex volition recognize a "p," "q," "b," and "d" as the aforementioned shape (a circle with a straight line attached), the wordbox will discriminate between the iv different letters!
Then if you are an experienced English language reader, your wordbox volition be active while you are reading this commodity. What if this text was in Chinese and you could not read Chinese?
The Wordbox is Shaped by Which Language You Read
Your wordbox will exist most agile when you look at words written in letters from the language you are most used to. Notwithstanding, across dissimilar cultures and languages, the wordbox develops in the aforementioned part of the brain. So when a Chinese-speaking person reads in Chinese, and when an English language-speaking person reads in English, the same part of the encephalon, the wordbox, volition be active (Figure 6). In fact, even people who are built-in blind and learn how to read by touch (called Braille reading) have a wordbox that is in the same office of the brain as in seeing people.
Figure half dozen - Training the wordbox by reading. Beyond the world, the wordbox forms in the same region of the brain, no matter what language a person learns. Once a person learns to read and write, the wordbox is shaped by experience in reading words in a certain linguistic communication, just as your arm muscles shape upwards the more than frequently you elevator weights.
Our brain is shaped by the experiences that we make throughout life. There is a part of our brain – the wordbox – that is prepared to recognize word shapes, and as we learn to read, will become trained in recognizing word shapes in any language we use to train information technology [5 ].
References
[1] ? Zimmer, C. 2005. Smithsonian Intimate Guide to Human Origins. Toronto, ON: Madison Press Books.
[2] ? Dehaene, S. 2009. Reading in the Encephalon. New York NY: Penguin Viking.
[3] ? Cohen, Fifty., Leh?ricy, Southward., Chochon, F., Lemer, C., Rivaud, S., and Dehaene, S. 2002. Linguistic communication-specific tuning of visual cortex? Functional properties of the visual word form area. Brain 125:1054-69. doi: 10.1093/encephalon/awf094
[4] ? Dehaene, S., Pegado, F., Braga, Fifty. W., Ventura, P., Nunes Filho, G., Jobert, A., et al. 2010. How learning to read changes the cortical networks for vision and language. Science 330:1359-64. doi: ten.1126/scientific discipline.1194140
[5] ? Dehaene S., and Cohen L. 2007. Cultural recycling of cortical maps. Neuron 56:384-98. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2007.x.004
Reviewed By:
Riverside Uncomplicated Schoolhouse serves children from prekindergarten through fifth grade in Princeton, NJ, Usa. Our diverse student trunk includes children from more than 23 different countries, and we all love to learn nigh brain! We also have a science lab, a courtyard with frogs and box turtles, a squad of dedicated teachers and support staff, and a groovy principal who always supports new opportunities for learning. Fourth grade students are either in Ms. Levy'due south or Mr. McGovern's classroom, and Mr. Eastburn is their teacher in the science lab.
Y'all tin can find the original article highlighted here – or many others like it – published at Frontiers for Young Minds. (Kassuba T and Kastner S (2015) The Reading Brain. Front Immature Minds. 3:5. doi: 10.3389/frym.2015.00005)
The views expressed are those of the author(due south) and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.
Source: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/frontiers-for-young-minds/the-reading-brain/
0 Response to "For Understanding What You Read Which Part of Brain Works"
Post a Comment