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Reading in the Brain

Mc.Mamudah — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 02:53:12 +0000

Humanity’s greatest invention

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.”

But how, in such a short time, did the human species evolve this unique skill, one that requires the brain to decode written words visually and process their sounds and sense rapidly? 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.

Amazingly, most children become proficient readers during elementary school (although learning to read Italian is easier, and learning to read Chinese harder, than learning to read English). In recent years, new imaging techniques have allowed researchers to watch normal brains in the act of reading, and studies have shed light on why the brains of dyslexic children, as well as those of certain stroke victims, fail to process written words successfully.

“Only a stroke of good fortune allowed us to read,” Dehaene writes near the end of his tour of the reading brain. Experiments in monkeys show that, within this area, individual nerve cells are dedicated to respond to a specific visual stimulus: a face, a chair, a vertical line. Research suggests that, in humans, a corresponding area evolved to become what Dehaene calls the “letterbox,” responsible for processing incoming written words. Located in the brain’s left hemisphere near the junction of the temporal and occipital lobes, the letterbox performs identical tasks in readers of all languages and scripts. Like a switchboard, it transmits signals to multiple regions concerned with words’ sound and meaning — for example, to areas that respond to noun categories (people, animals, vegetables), to parts of the motor cortex that respond to action verbs (”kiss,” “kick”), even to cells in the brain’s associative cortex that home in on very specific stimuli. Children learn reading in a stepwise process: first, awareness that words are made up of phonemes or speech sounds (ba, da); then the discovery that there’s a correspondence between these speech sounds and pairs or groups of letters.

Later the child begins to recognize entire words, and after a few years, reading speed becomes independent of word length. Dehaene deplores the whole-language approach to teaching reading in which beginning readers are presented with entire words or phrases in the hope of fostering earlier comprehension of text. He cites research showing that children who first learn which sounds are represented by which letters, and how pairs or groups of letters correspond to speech sounds, make steadier progress and achieve better reading scores than those taught using the whole-language method. For example, in preparation for learning to read, young Montessori students are often asked to trace with their fingers the shapes of large letters cut out of sandpaper. Between 5 percent and 17 percent of U.S. children suffer from dyslexia, or severe difficulty in reading.

Several susceptibility genes have been identified, most of them influencing the migration of nerve cells within the developing brain of the fetus. Research suggests that, even as infants, many dyslexic children have trouble hearing the difference between similar-sounding consonants such as b and d; but about one in four dyslexics has primarily visual difficulties with word-processing. Although there is no prospect of a cure for dyslexia, Dehaene points to promising results with various intervention strategies aimed at strengthening awareness of speech sounds and letter differences.

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THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL

Mc.Mamudah — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:11:45 +0000

THE TYRANNY OF E-MAIL

The Four-Thousand-Year Journey to Your Inbox

By John Freeman

On a recent weekday, 126 messages made it to my e-mail in-box. The rest were mass mailings or “cc’s,” including 17 messages from a Listserv, eight dispatches from news media I subscribe to, seven google alerts on a subject I’m interested in, four political rants and five pieces of spam, four of them in Cyrillic characters.

By John Freeman’s lights, that makes me a bad guy. In “The Tyranny of E-Mail,” he writes that “one of the biggest generators of excess mail is a medium-size message sent to a group of people, which then causes a pinball effect as people chime in and comment, having a virtual discussion.” And the problem is? Take the time to make 50 separate calls, intruding on people who aren’t interested in this issue? (Scan and delete an e-mail message: three seconds at most, at a time of one’s choice. Conduct a telephone call with me: 30 seconds, minimum, at a time of my choice, resulting in major interruption.)

The case of the Russian spam illustrates a problem with this book. In his zeal to expose e-mail’s dark side, Freeman, the editor of Granta, ignores its good and useful features.

I am far from the proverbial power user (the “average corporate worker,” Freeman tells us, in a characteristically unsourced factoid, gets about 200 e-mail messages a day). But I have felt e-mail’s tyranny, and Freeman has some good innings on this subject. It is an instantaneous, demanding, borderline addictive medium that has insinuated its way into hitherto private spaces. (Sixty-two percent of Americans, Freeman read somewhere, write and answer work e-mail on vacation.) It is abused by spammers, identity thieves, phishers and chronic forwarders and cc-ers.

Unfortunately, Freeman’s Chapters 1 and 2 undercut his jeremiad, which appears in Chapters 3 and 4. An editorial in an English newspaper in 1901, referring to the telegraph, lamented: “Our desire to outstrip Time has been fatal to more things than love. Remove the quotation marks, and the lines would fit perfectly into Freeman’s argument.

Books about social problems are often strong in describing the problem but fairly lame when it comes to suggesting solutions. The opposite is true of “The Tyranny of E-Mail.” Among other things, Freeman advises us to limit how many e-mail messages we send and how often we check our in-box, to keep a written to-do list, to be careful reading and composing e-mail, and not to “debate complex or sensitive matters by e-mail.” Ultimately, e-mail is a social, cultural and literary phenomenon that demands a more nuanced approach than Freeman’s high dudgeon provides. Every day, I get a half-dozen or more fine e-mail messages: short, (often) witty, (usually) pointed, (sometimes) thoughtful and always written in that correspondent’s particular register. You could have the book here.

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The interrogative mood

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THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD

Mc.Mamudah — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:02:43 +0000

THE INTERROGATIVE MOOD

By Padgett Powell

Does The Interrogative Mood sound like a C.I.A. agent’s whimsical memoir, an epistemological study, a grammar guide, a dating primer or a book that playfully and provocatively asks so many questions - funny, sad, informative, rhetorical, prurient, maudlin, political and absurd questions - that under its spell you’ll more clearly envision a better world while valuing no less intensely the flawed, fractured, fast-forward one you’re in?

If I said that The Interrogative Mood, the fifth novel by Padgett Powell, was that kind of book, and a captivating and often glorious reading experience, and if you believed me, would you get a copy soon, or would you decide that even though captivating, often glorious books don’t come along every day, you aren’t ready for something as open-ended and seemingly uncertain as this? If, then, I assured you that embedded in its all-question format are ideas and images and emotions uniquely and powerfully expressed, and that it is a great-hearted assault on ambivalence, would you realize that you are ready?

It is nothing like his “Edisto,” “Edisto Revisited” or “Mrs. Hollingsworth’s Men,” fictions of some lyrical force that suffered from rickety characters and unmoored plots, but instead a fearless meditation on the sublime and the trivial, a hydra-headed reflection of life as it is experienced and of thought as it is felt. With echoes of the Tao Te Ching, “My Funny Valentine,” Pascal’s “Pensées, Green Eggs and Ham,” Annie Dillard’s “This Is the Life” and countless other quests for conviction that secretly understand and depend on the futility of such quests, it is wondrous strange.

Would you be embarrassed or rather thrilled by yourself if you were caught by Einstein with your hand in his coat pocket?

“The Interrogative Mood” demands to be read deliberately, for it is courageous and entertaining and interested in the essential mysteries of self and society. You could have the book here.

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THE IMMORTALS

Mc.Mamudah — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 23:00:17 +0000

THE IMMORTALS

By Amit Chaudhuri

A devotee of Indian classical music, the boy is intent on defending this tradition against the threat of commercialism. Chaudhuri is not only a devotee of Hindustani music, but also a professional musician with several releases to his credit. Like his main character, Chaudhuri was tutored by a songstress mother and a beloved Rajasthani guru.

Chaudhuri lends Nirmalya his own health condition (a heart murmur), his own cosmopolitan identity (as a Bengali raised in Bombay - now Mumbai - and schooled in London) and the addresses of his own youth (the Senguptas retire from a luxury high-rise in downtown Bombay to Bandra, which at the time was on the frontier of the feverishly growing city, a suburb of churches and gulmohar trees where the Chaudhuris also lived).

In one scene, the Senguptas go for tea to the Leela Penta Hotel, an oasis of glass and palm trees at Bombay’s marshy edge. Nirmalya, glancing at the wasteland outside, notices a boy “squinting and squatting on the edge of a metal cylinder.” I can’t eat here until Shyamji is able to eat here.’

Shyamji is the boy’s teacher, respected but also judged by him for squandering his artistic inheritance as the son of a gifted classical musician. Shyamji must earn a living, so he neglects his own career to tutor the rich - including Nirmalya’s mother, a talented singer who has settled for being the dilettante wife of a business executive.

Gently and elusively, like the glow of a firefly, Chaudhuri’s irony lights up the complex status negotiations in the dark space that exists between the two families. Are Nirmalya and his mother disciples or employers? Was it the sight of a boy possibly defecating outside or a democratic concern for his guru’s dining options that made Nirmalya leave the Leela Penta Hotel? “The Immortals” confirms his reputation as a gifted miniaturist. You could have the book here.

READ ELSE BOOKs:

Sixty Feets, six inches

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THE FOURTH STAR

Mc.Mamudah — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 22:50:47 +0000

THE FOURTH STAR

Four Generals and the Epic Struggle for the Future of the United States Army

By David Cloud and Greg Jaffe

This book is about four generals David Petraeus and Peter Chiarelli, who led the transformation, and George W. Casey Jr. and John Abizaid, who were ultimately left behind by it. Instead of planning how to fight the next insurgency, the Army went right back to preparing for what it loved to do: fight big battles against big, uniformed armies just like itself. Training in guerrilla war, as Cloud and Jaffe show, was banished from the Army’s curriculum.

In the months before the war in Iraq began in March 2003, many American soldiers took part in huge mock tank battles against a mythical army known as the Kraznovians. Then the real war in Iraq began, and the American Army found itself disastrously unprepared for the conflict that unfolded. The Army transformed itself in Iraq, and not a moment too soon.

Abizaid, Casey, Chiarelli and Petraeus all began their Army careers in the 1970s, when the Army was at its post-Vietnam nadir - when drug abuse was so rampant and morale so low that it was said the military was incapable of actually fighting. All four men were exceptionally bright and hard-working, rising through the ranks as the Army struggled to rebuild itself.

George Casey, the son of a two-star general killed in Vietnam, was determined to ensure that the experience of that war would not be repeated. Peter Chiarelli, perhaps the most down-to-earth general in the Army, started his career teaching social science and never abandoned his thoughtful approach to soldiering.

But the hero of “The Fourth Star,” as of the Army itself, is David Petraeus, the brightest and most driven of all the bright and driven men around him. Chiarelli and Petraeus served in Iraq during this period, too, first as division commanders and then in more senior posts. Both men realized very quickly that the Army’s heavy-handed approach to fighting was driving the Iraqis away.

Abizaid and Casey, for all their talents, conceived and directed the strategy in Iraq that brought America to the brink of defeat. The essence of that strategy was to train Iraqi forces as quickly as possible so that American soldiers could come home. The result was anarchy and civil war.

Casey was promoted and brought back to Washington, Abizaid retired, and Petraeus took charge. (Chiarelli also went home, to become vice chief of staff of the Army, after serving an unhappy tenure as Casey’s deputy.)

“The Fourth Star” is a very good book, readable, detailed and rich. The profiles of Abizaid, Casey, Chiarelli and Petraeus are nuanced and well drawn; the generals really come to life, as does the Army itself. You could have the book here.

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