xi, 388 pages : 22 cm

"The act of reading is so easily taken for granted that we forget what an astounding feat it is. How can a few black marks on white paper evoke an entire universe of meanings? It's even more amazing when we consider that we read using a primate brain that evolved to serve an entirely different purpose. In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene explores every aspect of this human invention, from its origins to its neural underpinnings. A world authority on the subject, Dehaene reveals the hidden logic of spelling, describes pioneering research on how we process languages, and takes us into a new appreciation of the brain and its wondrous capacity to adapt."--Page 4 of cover

Originally published: New York : Viking, 2009

Includes bibliographical references (pages 331-375) and index

The new science of reading : From neurons to education ; Putting neurons into culture ; The mystery of the reading ape ; Biological unity and cultural diversity ; A reader's guide -- How do we read? : The eye: a poor scanner ; The search for invariants ; Amplifying differences ; Every word is a tree ; The silent voice ; The limits of sound ; The hidden logic of our spelling system ; The impossible dream of transparent spelling ; Two routes for reading ; Mental dictionaries ; An assembly of daemons ; Parallel reading ; Active letter decoding ; Conspiracy and competition in reading ; From behavior to brain mechanisms -- The brain's letterbox : Joseph-Jules Déjerine's discovery ; Pure Alexia ; A lesion revealed ; Modern lesion analysis ; Decoding the reading brain ; Reading is universal ; A patchwork of visual preferences ; How fast do we read? ; Electrodes in the brain ; Position invariance ; Subliminal reading ; How culture fashions the brain ; The brains of Chinese readers ; Japanese and its two scripts ; Beyond the letterbox ; Sound and meaning ; From spelling to sound ; Avenues to meaning ; A cerebral tidal bore ; Brain limits on cultural diversity ; Reading and evolution -- The reading ape : Of monkeys and men ; Neurons of objects ; Grandmother cells ; An alphabet in the monkey brain ; Provo-letters ; The acquisition of shape ; The learning instinct ; Neuronal recycling ; Birth of a culture ; Neurons for reading ; Bigram neurons ; A neuronal word tree ; How many neurons for reading? ; Simulating the reader's cortex ; Cortical biases that shape reading -- Inventing reading : The universal features of writing systems ; A golden section for writing systems ; Artificial signs and natural shapes ; Prehistoric precursors of writing ; From counting to writing ; The limits of pictography ; The alphabet: a great leap forward ; Vowels: the mothers of reading -- Learning to read : The birth of a future reader ; Three steps for reading ; Becoming aware of phonemes ; Graphemes and phonemes: a chicken and egg problem ; The orthographic stage ; The brain of a young reader ; The illiterate brain ; What does reading make us lose? ; When letters have colors ; From neuroscience to education ; Reading wars ; The myth of whole-word reading ; The inefficiency of the whole-language approach ; A few suggestions for educators -- The dyslexic brain : What is dyslexia? ; Phonological trouble ; The biological unity of dyslexia ; A prime suspect: the left temporal lobe ; Neuronal migrations ; The dyslexic mouse ; The genetics of dyslexia ; Overcoming dyslexia -- Reading and symmetry : When animals mix left and right ; Evolution and symmetry ; Symmetry perception and brain symmetry ; Dr. Orton's modern followers ; The pros and cons of a symmetrical brain ; Single-neuron symmetry ; Symmetrical connections ; Dormant symmetry ; Breaking the mirror ; Broken symmetry ... or hidden symmetry? ; Symmetry, reading, and neuronal recycling ; A surprising case of mirror dyslexia -- Toward a culture of neurons : Resolving the reading paradox ; The universality of cultural forms ; Neuronal recycling and cerebral modules ; Toward a list of cultural invariants ; Why are we the only cultural species? ; Uniquely human plasticity ; Reading other minds ; A global neuronal workspace -- The future of reading

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