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

Stanislas Dehaene’s Reading in the Brain is one of those rare books that permanently changes how you think about something you’ve done every day of your life without ever questioning it. Reading feels effortless and natural, yet Dehaene shows just how extraordinary (and biologically improbable) it really is. Our brains never evolved for reading, writing is only a few thousand years old, so how does a primate visual system manage to turn arbitrary marks on a page into meaning, sound, and thought in a fraction of a second? Dehaene answers this with clarity, rigor, and genuine wonder. He introduces the idea of “neuronal recycling”: the brain re-purposes existing circuits (especially the visual word form area) that originally handled object recognition. The same basic neural machinery appears across every writing system, whether alphabetic or logographic. The book is a masterful blend of neuroscience, cognitive psychology, history of writing, and education science. You’ll learn how the eye really scans text, why spelling systems work the way they do, how children acquire reading, and what goes wrong in dyslexia. Dehaene is especially convincing when he shows why certain teaching methods align with how the brain actually works, and why othrs (like pure whole-language approaches) fight against it. What makes the book exceptional is the writing. Dehaene, a world-class cognitive neuroscientist, never talks down to the reader, yet he never loses you in jargon either. The science is current (for its time), the examples are vivid, and the larger implications, about culture, plasticity, and the uniqueness of the human mind , are profound. If you care about how the brain works, how children learn, or simply want a deeper appreciation of the everyday miracle of reading, this is essential. Highly recommended. One of the best popular science books I’ve read in years.

Amazing book! Great price! Well made book as well!

328 pages 388 pages including references Reading In The Brain: The New Science Of How We Read by Stanislas Dehaene, published in 2009 by Penguin Books, has several potential audiences that could glean truly interesting and potentially useful information from this book. One audience might be Lexile Historians. Dehaene provides copious amounts of details on how cultures have evolved from simply reading the landscape, to drawing images in caves, to the first alphabet written by the Greeks, and so on. How the spoken languages have evolved through various cultures, leading English to be one of the most challenging to speak and spell, seemingly only behind the Chinese, who memorize over 3,000 images to this day. Neurologists (or neurologists-in-training) could also benefit from information provided in this Dehaene’s book. Descriptions of the areas of the brain utilized for reading and writing (spoiler: prefrontal cortex & occipito-temporal region) are provided, explaining how brain formation and development, sometimes at a later age, (check out the chapter on dyslexia!) influence the human ability to recognize letter sounds, followed by the letters themselves, the morphemes, and eventually entire words. We learn about the areas that are linked to facial recognition as well, and how that is linked to reading. In some stages, both hemispheres of the brain play a large role in reading skills, but eventually, one hemisphere takes on a larger responsibility as children are exposed to more and more. The “Letterbox” portion of the brain must be exposed enough to reading to be fully developed at the inception of adolescence in order for the child to be deemed an “expert” in reading. The brain’s function with reading and simple recognition changes over time, and Dehaene provides thorough descriptions of those transformations. Finally, teachers of reading (parents and licensed educators alike) are final benefactors of information in this book. Chapters 4-7 are primary areas of interest for this particular audience, where we learn a bit more about the evolution of writing and reading across cultures, with highlights on several languages and their simplicities or complexities in teaching reading and writing. As an educator, I found the most valuable information in a chapter entitled “Learning to Read.” Dehaene highlights the “Three Steps for Reading,” which are “logographic”-recognizing images, phoneme recognition, and grapheme recognition. It’s important to understand how a child’s brain develops-in that order-in order for them to learn to recognize letters accurately and eventually begin to form words and be able to sound out new ones. Children who are exposed to more speaking and reading at younger ages are more likely to avoid dyslexia, and overall struggles with reading comprehension and verbal processing. We must take our time in teaching children to decipher phonemes & graphemes if we expect them to eventually become fast(er) readers & writers; we cannot rush the process. The most interesting chapter to me was the chapter on Dyslexia-an area which I am very inexperienced with as an educator. Many people with dyslexia also have speech issues, which could be one of the first noticeable red flags for children. The author stresses that no set amount or type of factors play into a diagnosis of dyslexia, but it is predictable based on the parents and genetics, though other factors can play a part. It is also treatable with intensive interventions over the course of several weeks, bringing participants in a study up a few levels of readiness versus where they were prior to the interventions. Cons of the book: This particular reader (me) found some of the content to be bone dry and difficult to get through, primarily due to the heaviness of the material and general lack of interest in the topic. Pros: Plenty of development facts are published in this book, which could truly be a large help in understanding child brain development, and how the brain works when it comes to reading and writing. There is likely something in this book for any of the three audiences previously mentioned, and likely others as well. Fun facts learned: -The eyes move constantly while reading because the fovea, a small part of the cornea, helps to interpret & process. -Our gaze can advance 7-9 letters ahead. -It can take 50 milliseconds to process a word. -Most good readers can read 400-500 words per minute. -Font type influences speed at which we can read. -What we see depends on what we think we’re seeing. -Words take longer to read if they have more graphemes, not necessarily phonemes. -The right hemisphere is linked to facial recognition; the left is linked with reading & writing. -Reading improves verbal memory. -The Literate Mind: spelling mastery, richness of vocabulary, nuances of meaning, pleasures of literature. -Italian is the easiest language to learn (as a child, at least.) Bottom line: This entire book may not be for everyone, but there are portions that anyone could benefit from. It is worth a read, even if you don’t read the whole book.

i first came across dehaene's name in george lakoff's "where mathematics come from" -- and picked up his earlier number sense book. this book is in my opinion much more substantial -- he has been a researcher in this area for a long time, it seems, and he is very literate in the subject -- he provides a deep consideration of the neural correlates of reading, provides a coherent statement of what he calls neural recycling to explain how the brain adopts for reading across cultures, provides an in-depth exploration of dyslexia, and has a very profound vision of the place of neuroscience in education. he writes extremely well -- which is particularly impressive given that his original language is french. moreover, he has a breath of knowledge of language that goes beyond well english -- even pinker seems to be a professor of english. he makes reference to tomassello which impressed me no end since i wouldn't expect that breath of literacy from a neuroscientist. it provided me with everything i could have wished for, except for the field to be further along. i would not just recommend this book, but the author. i think before his career reaches its twilight, he will have contributed greatly both to neuroscience and its communication to the educated layperson.

I really enjoyed reading this book.This is a topic in which I am very interested. Dr. Dehaene wrote a thorough, in-depth, and compelling book. He points out that the area of the brain by which we read was a product of evolution but had evolved for an entirely different purpose other than reading. He makes this statement based on when reading emerged in human culture. A period of time that is too short for evolution to have developed writing. Instead, he shows that reading and writing were processes that were invented by man. Of course, the area of the brain, which is the same area for all human beings regardless of their culture, Was "recycled" for the use of this new and novel invention of man. Dr. Dehaene relates how neuroscience identified and traced the circuits involved in reading via an ever progressing imaging machines. Each evolution of imaging machine gave faster, richer, and more detailed results as to which neurons were firing during reading and more accurate locations in the brain. I found this to be a fascinating journey and literally devoured the material.

It is a thrilling read for those interested! The book carefully & scientifically describes the miracle of how we are able to read, and many of the variations in our abilities. It is a milestone contribution on how best to LEARN to read. It is a bit dated at this point. Still an excellent basis for learning more in detail and in neurobiological terms. I learned SO much!

All teachers should read this book. Rigorously researched and scientifically valid. Written by a neurologist who has done his own research. Easy to re ad and understand!!!

I bought this book to increase my teaching strategies for reading instruction. The book was heavily laden with scientific research, hypothesis, and anatomical diagrams. I suppose it was the author's intent to justify brain research and relate it to reading. After wading through the research, I did find some good teaching strategies and increased my knowledge of reading development. Also I ordered the kindle edition and found the charts and diagrams difficult to read. I recommend ordering a hard copy.

I've read this book in Portuguese in 2014 when I was concluding my paper on graduation. It changed completely changed my view about reading (and also of how my paper was being done). Stanislas is a well-respected scientist, especially on the studies of dyslexia.

This is an amazing science book which sheds light about how our brain works to synthesize the anatomy and physiology of reading ....

Read it, read it again and then read it again. With every read, I get a bit more out of it, understand more nuances and attach more bookmarks.

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.

Thank you