Proust and the Squid

the third cognitive breakthrough in the history of writing: the development of a writing system that requires only a limited number of signs to convey the entire repertoire of sounds in a language.

A little-discussed class system invisibly divides our society, with those families that provide their children environments rich in oral and written language opportunities gradually set apart from those who do not, or cannot. A prominent study found that by kindergarten, a gap of 32 million words already separates some children in linguistically im

What is historically humbling about Sumerian writing and pedagogy is not their understanding of morphological principles, but their realization that the teaching of reading must begin with explicit attention to the principal characteristics of oral language. This is exactly what takes place today in the supposedly “cutting-edge” curricula in our ow

the likely physiological basis of our ancestors’ first reading of tokens was a tiny new circuitry connecting the angular gyrus region with a few nearby visual areas and if Dehaene is correct, a few parietal areas involved in numeracy and occipital-temporal areas involved in object recognition

young novice readers tend to move through three short, fairly predictable steps. First, they make errors that are semantically and syntactically appropriate, but that bear no phonological or orthographic resemblance to the real word (“daddy” for “father”). Once they learn some rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, their errors show orthographic

When confronted, therefore, with the task of inventing functions like literacy and numeracy, our brain had at its disposal three ingenious design principles: the capacity to make new connections among older structures; the capacity to form areas of exquisitely precise specialization for recognizing patterns in information; and the ability to learn

The first is the fact that although it took our species roughly 2,000 years to make the cognitive breakthroughs necessary to learn to read with an alphabet, today our children have to reach those same insights about print in roughly 2,000 days. The second concerns the evolutionary and educational implications of having a “rearranged” brain for lear

In a pathbreaking meta-analysis of twenty-five imaging studies of different languages, cognitive scientists from the University of Pittsburgh found three great common regions used differentially across writing systems. In the first, the occipital-temporal area (which includes the hypothesized locus of “neuronal recycling” for literacy), we become p

Symbolization, therefore, even for the tiny token, exploits and expands two of the most important features of the human brain—our capacity for specialization and our capacity for making new connections among association areas. One major difference between the human brain and the brain of any other primate is the proportion of our brain devoted to t