Reading in the Brain
Thursday, December 24th, 2009
Reading in the Brain, The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention
Book review by Susan Okie for The Washington Post:
About 5,000 years ago, societies in ancient Sumeria, China and South America invented writing, and in the millennia since, the ability to read has propelled human intellectual and cultural development, vastly expanding our capacity to learn, create, explore and record what we think, feel and know. Reading supplies our brains with an external hard drive and gives us access to our species’s past: In the words of Francisco de Quevedo, it enables us “to listen to the dead with our eyes.”
About the author:
Stanislas Dehaene is a French psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist. He is currently heading the Cognitive NeuroImaging Unit within the NeuroSpin building of the Commissariat A l’Energie Atomique in Saclay near Paris, France’s most advanced brain imaging center. He is also a professor at College de France in Paris, where he holds the newly created chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology. In 2005, he was elected as the youngest member of the French Academy of Sciences.
Reading in the Brain at Amazon
[via Sanford Shapiro]