How a Case of Pure Alexia Confirmed the Role of Brain's Visual Word Form Area | Hacker News Reader

How a Case of Pure Alexia Confirmed the Role of Brain's Visual Word Form Area

blogs.scientificamerican.com

42 pointsjessaustin9 comments

>This made it hard to believe in a brain structure expressly devoted to reading.

recently on NPR it was mentioned that like reading did change the brain, very recently and very quickly, we can soon start to see/expect changes related to interaction with computing devices and those changes can be expected at least as profound if not more.

>A decade before Mike’s stroke, Turkeltaub had shown that a child’s brain shifts where and how it processes text as he or she learns to read.

still remember the time, like before and during the first couple years of elementary school, when i was reading whole paragraphs at once, visually, silently, ie. without in-head pronunciation.

> still remember the time, like before and during the first couple years of elementary school, when i was reading whole paragraphs at once, visually, silently, ie. without in-head pronunciation.

Ugh. Until my mid-20s I read with in-head pronunciation, and that was good. Now I've stopped -- don't know why -- and it's done terrible things to my understanding and recall of what I'm reading. It makes it much easier to read something and forget it near-instantaneously.

do you still read sequentially, ie. word by word, line by line, or do you take it in as a whole image? I remember pretty opposite effect from absence of in-head pronunciation, in childhood as mentioned before as well as back at the University when i was sometimes reaching "nirvana"-like (for lack of better word) state when i was able to read with full understanding pages of mathematics just by looking at them without strenuous sequentializing of words and formulas - unfortunately it was pretty rare occasions, usually happening after several days of pretty tedious work in sequential mode and it was pretty exhausting. My mental model of such situations, given the image style intake of info, is that right hemisphere was somehow participating in it.

If you still reading sequentially, ie. left hemisphere dominated process, i think we can theorize [as laymen of course] that, given that in-head pronunciation may be considered as a bridge/shortcut into semantics from visual processing words shape match, weakening of in-head pronunciation can be like breaking that bridge/shortcut. I mean we learn language initially as spoken language, so semantics gets connected to the pronunciation, and later when writing/reading comes along it may be not a surprise that visual gets plugged into pronunciation instead of directly into semantics - after all we start reading and writing by doing it aloud with teachers, etc.

Subjectively, less sequentially than I did. I'll reiterate that I see this as a bad thing that impairs my reading process and harms understanding.

Usually when I'm not concentrating I found myself reading this way yet still don't know what I'm reading. But once you're in the flow, reading is understanding. It's a matter of interest. When kid is forced to read school book, this happens.

Are people looking at the organization of these macrostructures in the brain to design generalized AIs yet?

People have been doing this from the foundation of AI in the 50s. My favorite example is Jerry Lettvin's paper on the frog's eye: http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/books/whatthefrogseyetellsthefrogsb... but there are many earlier ones too.

Interesting science for a non-expert. Even a better story of the power of the human spirit to overcome obstacles like a damaged visual word form area.

Interesting. I'm currently reading Oliver Sacks' "The Mind's Eye", which includes a few cases of alexia. A good read if you'd like more stories about this and you like Sacks' style.

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