
How a Case of Pure Alexia Confirmed the Role of Brain's Visual Word Form Area - jessaustin
http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/mind-guest-blog/how-a-curious-condition-solved-a-neuroscientific-mystery/
======
trhway
>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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
> 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.

~~~
trhway
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.

~~~
thaumasiotes
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.

------
noobermin
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.

------
coroxout
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.

