---
product_id: 214307696
title: "Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read"
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---

# Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read

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## Description

Buy Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read Illustrated by Dehaene, Stanislas (ISBN: 9780143118053) from desertcart's Book Store. Everyday low prices and free delivery on eligible orders.

Review: An instructive book - Dehaene describes how an area of the temporal cortex processes the written word. This so called 'letterbox' of the brain is situated within the left ventral visual area. All information about written words passes through this, and it is located in the same area whatever the language of the subjects. The brain is seen as dividing its visual work into categories, with each performed by a different patch of the cortex. Many of the preferred shapes of the 'letterbox' neurons are shapes that resemble letters, symbols or Chinese characters; these are collectively referred to as proto-letters. These may have evolved to help identify objects by being invariant to changes in images. With letters, whatever the type of font, size or colour of the letters, our interpretation does not change. The 'letterbox' is located between an area of the cortex that recognises landscapes and buildings and another that recognises faces. Thus the ventral surface of the brain contains areas tuned to recognising particular types of feature. However, the specialisation of such areas overlaps. Specialisation seems to be at the level of neurons, with neurons of different specialisations intermingled. Visual analysis in reading is followed by extraction of sound patterns and meaning. Nerve fibres project from the 'letterbox' towards other parts of the temporal cortex. At their destinations, separate networks appear to be involved in processing sound and meaning. The left-middle and ventral regions of the left temporal lobe are thought to be specialised in processing meaning. The lateral temporal region appears to be subdivided into regions dealing with the meaning of particular words. Regions near the front of the temporal lobe appear to concentrate on the meanings of words when combined into sentences. It is suggested that areas such as this act as convergence zones for information from the rest of the brain. Something that evolves for one purpose can get taken over for another. Literacy is seen as changing the brain with both an increase in left brain engagement and an increase in activity between the two hemispheres. The 'letterbox' was originally evolved for something else, so reading may be paid for by some offsetting cognitive loss. The only serious criticism of the book is that this interesting question is not tackled in greater depth.
Review: Contains stunning new information - Twenty years ago I read Caplan, "Language", which reveals the multiple whole-word and grapheme/phoneme dictionaries for input/output, speech and writing, that the brain contains. These had been demonstrated by experiments in Cognitive Psychology. This, and other books on psycholinguistics, provided a refreshing new outlook, compared to my more mathematical studies of typed feature structure grammars like Stanford's Lingo, which are profoundly Chomskyan. In AI, Charniak's book claimed that Chomskyan approaches would not deliver results in computer analysis of language, and recommended a statistical approach. The "garden path" sentences beloved of phsycholinguists, like "The horse raced past the barn fell" also suggest that collocations or "n-grams", weighted statistically by their frequency, also play a large part in language understanding. I liked Jackendoff's two recent books, which in contrast to Chomsky, suggested a multi-level approach with morphology at the bottom, and ontologies at the top, in which each level exchanges information with levels above and below. From a mathematical perspective, this points to a constraint-based approach in which the whole system settles to a solution that is optimal across all levels. The book by Dehaene plugs into these various approaches without even referencing them, so I assume the author has arrived at his conclusions independently via neuroscience theories and experimentation. The various dictionaries described by Caplan seem to become emergent structures formed from the letter-pairs that Dehaene demonstrates are stored in the brain. Any sort of pairings suggest statistically weighted collocations as being a fundamental component, and Dehaene also demonstrates how the various levels of Jackendoff's models map onto distinct brain regions. Dehaene is a "must-read". I heard about it on the "Brain Science Podcast" which I recommend to anyone interested in neuroscience.

## Technical Specifications

| Specification | Value |
|---------------|-------|
| Best Sellers Rank | 152,269 in Books ( See Top 100 in Books ) 185 in Reading Skills Reference 277 in Study & Learning Skills for Educational Students 454 in Child & Developmental Psychology in Education |
| Customer reviews | 4.6 4.6 out of 5 stars (632) |
| Dimensions  | 14.02 x 2.16 x 21.39 cm |
| Edition  | Illustrated |
| ISBN-10  | 0143118056 |
| ISBN-13  | 978-0143118053 |
| Item weight  | 329 g |
| Language  | English |
| Print length  | 400 pages |
| Publication date  | 26 Oct. 2010 |
| Publisher  | Penguin Publishing Group |

## Images

![Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read - Image 1](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/714ZJg2HzTL.jpg)

## Customer Reviews

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ An instructive book
*by S***T on 3 July 2014*

Dehaene describes how an area of the temporal cortex processes the written word. This so called 'letterbox' of the brain is situated within the left ventral visual area. All information about written words passes through this, and it is located in the same area whatever the language of the subjects. The brain is seen as dividing its visual work into categories, with each performed by a different patch of the cortex. Many of the preferred shapes of the 'letterbox' neurons are shapes that resemble letters, symbols or Chinese characters; these are collectively referred to as proto-letters. These may have evolved to help identify objects by being invariant to changes in images. With letters, whatever the type of font, size or colour of the letters, our interpretation does not change. The 'letterbox' is located between an area of the cortex that recognises landscapes and buildings and another that recognises faces. Thus the ventral surface of the brain contains areas tuned to recognising particular types of feature. However, the specialisation of such areas overlaps. Specialisation seems to be at the level of neurons, with neurons of different specialisations intermingled. Visual analysis in reading is followed by extraction of sound patterns and meaning. Nerve fibres project from the 'letterbox' towards other parts of the temporal cortex. At their destinations, separate networks appear to be involved in processing sound and meaning. The left-middle and ventral regions of the left temporal lobe are thought to be specialised in processing meaning. The lateral temporal region appears to be subdivided into regions dealing with the meaning of particular words. Regions near the front of the temporal lobe appear to concentrate on the meanings of words when combined into sentences. It is suggested that areas such as this act as convergence zones for information from the rest of the brain. Something that evolves for one purpose can get taken over for another. Literacy is seen as changing the brain with both an increase in left brain engagement and an increase in activity between the two hemispheres. The 'letterbox' was originally evolved for something else, so reading may be paid for by some offsetting cognitive loss. The only serious criticism of the book is that this interesting question is not tackled in greater depth.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Contains stunning new information
*by A***R on 6 July 2013*

Twenty years ago I read Caplan, "Language", which reveals the multiple whole-word and grapheme/phoneme dictionaries for input/output, speech and writing, that the brain contains. These had been demonstrated by experiments in Cognitive Psychology. This, and other books on psycholinguistics, provided a refreshing new outlook, compared to my more mathematical studies of typed feature structure grammars like Stanford's Lingo, which are profoundly Chomskyan. In AI, Charniak's book claimed that Chomskyan approaches would not deliver results in computer analysis of language, and recommended a statistical approach. The "garden path" sentences beloved of phsycholinguists, like "The horse raced past the barn fell" also suggest that collocations or "n-grams", weighted statistically by their frequency, also play a large part in language understanding. I liked Jackendoff's two recent books, which in contrast to Chomsky, suggested a multi-level approach with morphology at the bottom, and ontologies at the top, in which each level exchanges information with levels above and below. From a mathematical perspective, this points to a constraint-based approach in which the whole system settles to a solution that is optimal across all levels. The book by Dehaene plugs into these various approaches without even referencing them, so I assume the author has arrived at his conclusions independently via neuroscience theories and experimentation. The various dictionaries described by Caplan seem to become emergent structures formed from the letter-pairs that Dehaene demonstrates are stored in the brain. Any sort of pairings suggest statistically weighted collocations as being a fundamental component, and Dehaene also demonstrates how the various levels of Jackendoff's models map onto distinct brain regions. Dehaene is a "must-read". I heard about it on the "Brain Science Podcast" which I recommend to anyone interested in neuroscience.

### ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Essential reading for teachers
*by K***N on 30 March 2014*

This is a fascinating resume of the latest research into how we are able to read. If you want to understand what happens in the human mind when we read and what happens when reading goes wrong, this book provides many insights. It comes from a very Scientific angle and some of the sections are quite dense and detailed.

## Frequently Bought Together

- Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read
- How We Learn: The New Science of Education and the Brain
- The Number Sense: How the Mind Creates Mathematics, Revised and Updated Edition

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