The brain, writing and the thesis VI French magazine popular science La Recherche , in its February of this year, published some items under the general heading misleading "How the brain learns." I will dwell on only one aspect of the series: The neuronal recycling with the advent of writing and learning of reading. In the article by journalist Jacques Abadie, is described in detail the results of laboratory investigations in French and Portuguese. These investigations have revealed that when viewing the written word activates all brain areas of oral language and inversely to hear a word (phrase) activates the area coding written form, in people who can read. This last point is important because it concerns the second aspect of the findings reported in Article.
Indeed, international studies conducted by Stanislas Dehaene of the Collège de France , revealed with the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which learning to read substantially changed the organization of our brain. Literate people in the areas of sight and speech are more extensive and more strongly activated when shown a written word. Another aspect revealed by the research is the surprising fact that the area is responsible for writing, the illiterate used for the representation of faces. These works are very recent, the latest findings were published in January 2011 and serve to reinforce the new theory: the acquisition of reading is made possible by a vast restructuring brain, ending in an area of \u200b\u200bspecialization in the treatment of script (written language).
The starting point
In the article, Jacques Abadie recounts the emergence of the hypothesis in the late nineteenth century. In 1887, the French neurologist Jules Dejerine Joseph served in his cabinet to a patient suffering a bad strange, it could no longer read, but still easily recognizing objects, faces and figures. Five years later the patient died of neurovascular injury. In carrying out the autopsy, Dejerine old lesions observed in the back of the left hemisphere, specifically in the temporal lobe, a region essential for the treatment of visual stimuli. Dejerine assumed that these lesions explained the "word blindness" of the patient and the area impaired was also indispensable for reading.
As all scenarios this was not unanimously accepted, but has since launched several investigations. Since that time, has been given to this specialized area reading: "area of \u200b\u200bthe visual form of words." Thanks to Magnetic resonance neuroimaging over the last twenty years has come to confirm the hypothesis of Dejerine, many fMRI laboratories have studied the brains of patients who suffer from word blindness. By overlaying the images the lesions observed in these patients, neurologists have been able to delimit an area that seems necessary to decode the script.
In 2006 a study conducted in one of the largest hospitals in Paris, Pitié-Salpêtrière , and directed by Laurent Cohen, came to further confirm this hypothesis. A group of neurologists interested in the case of a person suffering from epilepsy, whose seizures come from that area. They applied electrodes to identify and delineate the area to operate and cure of epileptic seizures. Among the preliminary tests I did a reading test, the patient could read to perfection and the area of \u200b\u200bthe visual form of words is activated normally. However, after removal of this part, the patient was unable to simultaneously recognize all the letters of a word. Was required to decipher one by one. However he could recognize other objects.
A lack of linguistic
While the discussion on the existence of an area for reading is not definitely closed, alongside another question arises: is this area is predestined from birth reading?
By raising this question, the journalist goes to a surprising reflection, reads: "Until the 1980's, was considered the language as a phenomenon (donnee) biological a competition for the man. It seems logical that the neural circuits that support the visual treatment of words are somehow pre-wired, even if the reading requires knowledge. " This assertion not only surprised me, but I am dismayed. The social nature of language has no discussion since before Ferdinand de Saussure, but enough rational evidence to give Federer advances as set out what it means absurd to think that the language could be a biological phenomenon. I think this statement appalling is the fruit of knowledge of the language heard and a cross-reading of the work of Chomsky. On the other side with respect to language is not only learning, but also ownership. I have tried this in my article: " Language: product condition of society."
But what is even more surprising is how the issue raised by the reporter, since the development of your article's description of the investigation gives rise to such an approach. Immediately corrects and says that thanks to advances in magnetic resonance imaging, this view has changed in the late nineties. From this date is possible to compare brain activity of those who can read to the illiterate.
's article La Recherche shows that in 1998 a team led by Alexandre Castro-Caldas from the school Egas Moniz Lisbon, gave a experience with people who can read and people who do not know. These people had to repeat aloud words that actually exist, then "pseudo", ie made up words. While their brains were analyzed using CT by positron emission . The result was that the illiterate did not activate the same brain structures than read. This was one of the first evidence that the learning of reading amending the general structure of the language areas.
At this time I get to the article that most interests me highlight and that leads me to briefly share a thought that at the end.
A new theory
Stanilas Dehaene, with its team of cognitive neuroimaging unit Inserm (National Institute of Health and Medical Research), has meant that this change was influenced by the establishment of neuronal circuits decoder words. Consequently, these circuits are not present at birth, but are formed during learning . " This idea is consistent with the fact that reading way too recently appeared in the history of mankind to have weighed on our genetic evolution said Jose Morais, Free University of Brussels. The first traces of writing, discovered in Mesopotamia, dating back some 5 400 years. In a very short time scale, the human brain has not had sufficient time to adapt and develop a specialized structure for reading. "
Jacques Abadie in his article in La Recherche explains that Stanislas Dehaene and Laurent Cohen in 2007 have proposed a new theory on the brain basis of reading, the neuronal recycling. This new theory is that neural networks to decode written words take on other functions before we learn to read, ie recycled. This hypothesis rests on the idea that the brain can be reconfigured depending on experience and learning that we do.
The article goes on to describe other experiences that do not change what has been presented here. So I interrupt this extensive summary of Jacques Abadie article published in the February 2011 of La Recherche .
The thesis VI Marx on Feuerbach
While some people may seem exaggerated or simply nonsense, these facts and statements set forth above, the closer exposed to what Karl Marx in his sixth thesis on Feuerbach. What does this thesis?
precisely the content of this thesis has given rise to multiple controversies, I can not go into them without running the risk of excessively prolong an article for a blog. So, I will note only that its content has shifted to wanting to summarize in a single sentence that becomes false: "the essence of man are human relations." I give the translation more or less generally accepted by the Castilian:
" Feuerbach resolves the religious essence into the human essence. But the human essence is no abstraction inherent in each individual. It is, in reality, all social relations.
Feuerbach, not a criticism of this real essence is hence obliged:
1) to ignore the historical, focusing on its own religious feelings and to presuppose an abstract human individual, isolated .
2) In it, the human essence can only be seen as "gender" as a general internal move, which naturally unites the many individuals . "
The approach that I operate from the above investigations and the sixth thesis of Marx may not jump to the view so clearly. I'll try to explain it. This thesis is a critique not only of Feuerbach's conception, but a way of thinking that lasts until now and that is the object of thought erect an abstraction, as eg "man" and seeks to identify, enumerate all of its own, own. It takes the "man" as a "kind" to contrast it with the "animal" and they take such as their "own" in the definitions of the thought of understanding, as is defined in Aristotle's Organon. In this way point to its vertical position, the opposition of the thumb to the rest of your fingers, your brain power, etc. In recent times that genetics plays a vanguard in biological studies to determine the essential question of "man" through genetic determination, genes. In calls humanities or social sciences, also defines a "man" and usually makes a generalization, which refers to homo eoconomicus , which ends up being a series of psychological features of the bourgeois capitalist bosses while.
In The German Ideology, Karl Marx reaffirms its position this way: "The" conception "of the sensory world Feuerbach is limited, firstly, to its mere contemplation and, secondly, the mere sensation: it says " the man "instead of" real historical man. " In this sentence we can see, if we try to penetrate its meaning, of the profound revolution in thought that made Marx. For the fantasy "man" forces us to exclude the history of reality, not to see "that the sensory world around him is not something directly given from all eternity and always like itself, but the product of industry and social status, in the sense that it is a historical product, the result of the activity of a series of generations, each of which is perched on the shoulders of the previous one, continues to develop its industry and trade and adjust social organization under the new requirements. Even the objects of "sense certainty" you are given simple only for social development, industry and trade. So we know that the cherry tree, like almost all fruit trees, was transplanted to our area a few centuries ago by the work of trade and through this action of a given society and a specific time was given to the "sense-certainty 'of Feuerbach."
Returning now to writing, we realize that there is also historically, socially. Success in our society for some men and nonexistent for others and whether or not this has repercussions even in neural flows in some men, the areas of "verbal vision" is more extensive and are activated more strongly "than others that expansion and this increased activation is the product of learning, the appropriation of writing. This means that here we are dealing with a determination that comes from outside to inside, comes from a social, as learning is necessarily an action that takes place among men.
Our brain is able to restructure, has an elasticity, but this is set in motion "based on experiences and learning that we do." Individual development depends on human relations in society that lives will allow, you may have.
