Primed for Reading 英文参考文献.docVIP

BookReview/ScienceintheMedia PrimedforReading RobertBoyd* DepartmentofAnthropology,UniversityofCaliforniaLosAngeles,LosAngeles,California,UnitedStatesofAmerica Readingisanamazingskill.Asyouread this review, meaning flows from the page (orformanyreaders,thescreen)intoyour brain. This happens automatically—you can’tchoosenottounderstandthewritten word any more than the spoken one. It’s also highly efficient. Most people can processtexttwoorthreetimesfasterthan speech. Of course, humans have many amazing skills. We also identify objects, decode speech, and understand complex social situations automatically and effi- ciently. However, the machinery in the brain that gives us these abilities, and many more, was plausibly constructed by natural selection, and, if so, they are adaptations just like our peculiar pelvis and the thick enamel on our molars. Reading arose a few thousand years ago, and this means that machinery in the brainthatallowsustoreaddidnotevolve for that purpose. Instead, a series of scribes,priests, andprinters workingover afewthousandyearsgraduallydevisedthe writing systems that give rise to this amazing skill. In this fascinating book, Stanislaus Dehaene details how cognitive abilities evolved for other purposes were co-opted for reading, how these abilities areinstantiatedinthebrain,andhowthey constraintheculturalevolutionofwriting systems. andamyriadofotherthings.Information from the letter box then flows to brain regions that deal with speech and mean- ing, leading to a two-path system that allowsustorapidlyrecognizethemeaning of familiar words while simultaneously sounding out unfamiliar ones. Dehaene tellsthestoryexperimentbyexperiment— agoodnarrativestrategybecauseheexcels at giving the reader an intuition for how the experiments work. For example, he likens diffusion fMRI to detecting road- ways by looking at blurred nighttime photographs of the tail lights of the cars drivingonthem. Reading in the Brain explains, with ex- ceptional cl