A (0:04)

Okay. This is today's Brain Science Live, and I'm Ginger Campbell, the hope of Brain Science, a podcast that explores how discoveries in neuroscience are unraveling the mystery of how our brains make us human. So before I get started, I want to mention that if you want to go on the trip to Australia in 2019 is going to be May 20th through 29th, then you will need to start signing up. I accidentally announced in episode 148 that the deadline was October 1st, which is a few days ago. That was wrong, what I meant to say, and I had a miscommunication with my new editor. I meant to say that you can start putting down your deposit on October 1st, so there's still plenty of time to sign up. I'm hoping to get about 16 people. So if you want more information about that trip, be sure to email me@brainsciencepodcastmail.com Also, I want to mention that our sponsor is the Great Courses plus, which is a great way to learn from experts in a wide variety of fields. And if you want to give that a try for free for a month, the link is thegreatcoursesplus.com Ginger? Okay, so today we are going to be Talking about episode 145, which was about reading in the brain, and an interview with Dr. Marianne Wolf, who I actually interviewed on the show way back in 2008. I think it was episode 29. Anyway, I got quite a bit of feedback about this episode. People seemed to be sort of upset about a couple of issues, and I'm going to address those today. One thing I want to mention is that this episode was not intended to be a very technical episode, and I think people didn't realize that, and that was kind of my fault. One of the key ideas that we talked about was that reading is a cultural invention. It's not like language, which we are sort of hardwired to learn. It's a cultural invention. And so it does not come naturally. And we can't assume that children are going to be good readers without help. And there were people who wrote to me who seemed to disagree with this. They pointed to methods like Montessori, which seemed to be based on the idea that you could learn to read naturally. And there are a few children that learn to read at a very young age, but that is not the norm. Now, the thing about the neuroscience of reading is that there's solid evidence about what works. And that was not what this episode was about, because that was what I talked about back in episode 136. And so quite a few people that sent me emails, I was referring back to that episode. In fact, the reason why I invited Dr. Wolff on was because I hadn't been able to get the author of Reading at the Speed of Sight. Mark Seidberg, who was his book, was the source for episode 136, which was an update on the neuroscience of reading. Couldn't get a hold of him. So I actually wrote to her, sort of asking her opinion about whether his book represented up to date knowledge, and she said that it did. And then we went around and around for several months so that by the time we actually got on the podcast together, neither one of us really had our mind on that book anymore. And I think that kind of is the reason why the episode kind of didn't go in the direction that it could have. Now, Dr. Wolf had spent a large part of her career helping children with dyslexia learn how to read. And so that required understanding about what's going on in the brain when you read. Her book from 2008, Proust and the Squid was an excellent overview of what was known about reading science at that time. Now she's fixed on digital media. And her point was that since our brains are plastic, we ought to care about what's going to happen when our reading habits change from reading printed material to reading digital material. There were people who felt that she was overly critical of digital media. And I don't know whether that was a reflection of the way I asked my questions or that they weren't listening carefully. Because definitely in her writings, Dr. Wolf has been clear that she realizes that there's pros and cons to both approaches. There are learners who do better with digital media and there's learners who do better with printed material. Although I must say, separate from Dr. Wolff's writings, I've read a lot about the advantages of having a printed book and the fact that just the physical interaction with the book seems to promote learning. At any rate, her main point was that since our brains are plastic, how we read is going to change our brains. And we ought to think about the fact that the so called digital native generation's brains may be different because of the way that they're learning how to read. And in her latest book, Read or Come Home, she really talks about the importance of making sure that children develop both skills, that is the skill of reading printed material, which involves slowing down and thinking, and the skill of reading digital, which is not the same. It's not that one is better or worse. They're just different. And I, for one, have come to realize that I don't really absorb material I read digitally and that if I want to absorb it, I like a printed material. Of course, that's probably a reflection of the age I am and the fact that I learned how to read from a printed book. But I do agree with her that it's important that children learn how to read the good old fashioned way so that they will take time to think and so that they will be able to be connected across. You know, the thing about the printed word as a cultural invention is that it allows us to connect with people across time and space. We can read about people in other parts of the world. We can read things that people wrote, you know, thousands of years ago, and that's really a big deal. And if children don't have the ability to read the printed page, then they're losing something. And that's really what she's worried about. And I think, you know, I was maybe four or five, I can remember very vividly wanting to go to school to learn how to read. It was something. I mean, I wanted to go to school to learn how to read, period. That was what I thought school meant. And even now, reading is one of my biggest joys. So that's one reason why I'm interested in this whole what happens in your brain when you read and how can kids learn how to read? And I'm concerned about the fact that overall, teachers are not taught the science of reading. They're taught that there's something magical about what people have always done and that somehow that makes it right rather than testing whether or not it lives up to the science. Here's an example. In episode 136, I didn't really talk about this much, but in his book, Seidenberg talks about the physiological limits of reading that are related to the visual processing. So speed reading is totally bogus because there's a limit to how quickly we can actually process visual information. In fact, learning how to read appears to be. According to the scientist Stanislav Dennehy, it's really about taking the circuits in our brain that are devoted to processing visual information and sort of, you might say, repurposing them to learn how to read, which is really pretty amazing. He argues in his book about reading that the reason why alphabets have certain things in common is that the way that we recognize visual objects determines what kind of alphabets really work. So I think this idea that reading is not natural is important, and it has science behind it. And I apologize if this episode and even tonight's episode, because I'm not going back over the same science again is not giving you all that science, because the purpose of these Facebook lives is just to give people chance to submit questions and also to get a sense of what kind of stuff we talk about. But last month we talked about language in the brain. We really do seem to be wired for language so that as long as you are exposed to language during the critical period, you probably learn it. Reading is different, and this is something that's important to understand. For example, I got an email from Jason, who said that he felt she had ignored the positives about digital media and sent me a link to an article in Scientific American about this. And I wrote him back, and I said that I felt that her writing is more balanced than she came across in the interview. In fact, she's involved in a literacy just. Dr. Wolfe is involved in literacy projects that involve bringing tablets to children in rural Africa and Alabama, actually to a part of Alabama close to where I live, to use tablets to see if kids can teach themselves how to read with the help of a tablet. So it's not that she was like against digital. I really want to emphasize that it's not about being against digital, but it's about realizing that how we learn how to read will rewire our brains. And then there was that whole issue. For Dr. Wolff, it's all about what she calls deep reading and whether people will lose the ability to do deep reading if they don't read the old fashioned way. I don't know about that, but it is interesting that I get lots of books in the mail, and one I got recently was on the bullet journaling method, and some of you may have heard of that. It's a sort of popular method for doing a written journal. And the author talks about the advantage of writing in the journal. The way he describes, he says, you really writing forces you to slow down and reflect. And the same thing could be said for reading in the printed word that it could force you to slow down and reflect. Although I think it's certainly possible to read something in the printed form just as superficially as you read a digital thing. But in contrast, I don't think it's quite so easy to try to slow down when you're reading in a digital form. Maybe it'd be interesting to hear from one of you who is younger about whether or not you can read something really complicated in digital form and think about it carefully. Maybe. Maybe that's a skill that people who start out reading in the digital format will develop. But I think that. I really think that she makes a good point, is that we should think about the fact that since our brains are plastic, how we learn how to read could make a difference and we should be thinking about it. I think really that's the most important principle. Okay, so some people think that language is no more natural than writing. But I don't think that, from what I've been reading of the science recently, that may not be true. I don't want to get into a debate about it. All I can tell you is that the scientists who study reading and the scientists who study language seem to feel that there's a big difference. And I don't know that it's particularly important to fight about except for the fact that people learn language without being taught. That's the point. I mean, you don't really have to be taught language, and most people have to be taught how to read. Now, I don't remember being taught how to read, so I'm not going to argue that you can't learn it naturally or fairly easy, depending on your motivation. But there's no way that given that written language is as young as it is, that we could be evolved for it. The evidence that we've got is that basically what we're looking at is repurposing visual and language circuits into reading rather than, you know, something that's just a place that automatically becomes a reading circuit. In fact, one of the ways that we know this is by looking at people that are not literate. There are still a few pockets of non literate people in the world. No, There's a comment about Chomsky, and I am evolving my views of Chomsky. I still am not particularly a fan of Chomsky, but Based on what Dr. Federici told me when I interviewed her and all the evidence that she has studied, it does appear that there are some natural inclinations toward language, even though there's not a part of the brain that's like the language module, which was the thing I was most opposed to. But in all the science, all the books I've been reading about reading by people who are doing science, not people who are evoking authority figures. The difference is that writing is a cultural invention. Every group of people you ever see has language. But many cultures do not have writing. Writing is much more limited. One of the things that has happened over the years is when cultures are exposed to writing, sometimes people try to invent writing for their particular Language, but lots of languages have no written form. And maybe you can think of an example of a language. Well, maybe, I don't know, Vulcan or Romulan or one of those made up languages on Star Trek might have a written form and no spoken form. But, but I don't think that counts. So I got an email from somebody who sent me an excerpt from Montessori about the idea that since they saw children whose parents couldn't read that that meant that they somehow, that it was a natural thing to learn. And I don't know, that again, seems, you know, it's certainly an argument. Okay, I want to recap because I feel like I've kind of gotten a little off track here. The three points that I really wanted to make tonight is one, I don't feel that Dr. Wolf in episode 145 was at all disparaging digital as a way of communications. She was just trying to say that we need to think before we leap. Obviously we're not going to because we've already leapt, but that given that we have the ability to study what's going on, we need to pay attention. And she now what she's working on is trying to figure out how as teaching the young people that are coming up now, because this is her passion, how do we teach them to be, you might say, bilingual in the sense of reading, that is be able to be digital natives and successfully also read print media in the way that she calls deep reading. The other thing was I think there were people who felt that her references, they were offended by her references to the use of phonics, like teaching methods. And here I just want to say that as I talked about in episode 136, evidence for the importance of the phonemes is pretty solid. And it just goes to show you that things aren't always what they seem. Just like when we talked with Dr. Federici about language. I mean, I intuitively don't think that it makes sense that syntax would be processed first. Yet that is what the evidence shows. Meanwhile, there's also evidence that when people read they use phonetic information. So that helping kids to realize there's a relationship between the Alphabet and the sounds of their language is a key idea. At any rate, I really just feel like it wasn't fair to her if people came across with the wrong ideas because it was kind of a light hearted, you might say, conversation not intended to be, you know, into a high level of science rigor, like I said, because I had felt that I had presented that information in A recent episode, and that's episode 136. If you want to go back, and if you really want to know about the latest science of reading, the book Language at the Speed of Sight by Mark Seidenberg is the way to go. If you want to know more about what Dr. Wolff's writing about now, her latest new book, which has came out since we talked, is called Reader Come Home. So now, before we close, I am going to again remind you that if you'd like to come with me to Australia, it's now time to start putting in those deposits. October 1st was not the deadline. It was the day that you could begin signing up. And if you'd like to learn more, please email me@brainsciencepodcastmail.com the dates of the trip are May 20th through 30th, 2019, and I'm hoping to get a group of about 16 people. We're going to spend five days traveling around the area of Melbourne and five days going to Sydney. Okay, so somebody just submitted a really good question, so I'm going to jump to that question of when does simple visual symbols on the wall of a cave become sophisticated enough to be classified as something you can read? Okay, that's a great question. And I think that the official answer is when the symbols actually represent the sounds of the language. Okay. Or can at least be. Somehow you can go from the symbols to the spoken language and there's a relationship. So, for example, the Alphabet some people, like the Greek Alphabet, which are alphabets a descendant of. Some people had originally argued that that was somehow better than, say, the pictographic language of Chinese, similar stuff in Japanese, but we no longer believe that that's the case. One of the things that Seidenberg talks about in his book is there's no ideal Alphabet because different languages have different sounds, and representing them successfully will be different according to those languages. So a universal Alphabet doesn't really work. As you see, when we try to put certain languages into the Alphabet we use, it doesn't, you know, necessarily work very well. So to reiterate, the sophisticated enough step is the correspondence between the spoken language and the symbols. So when you are, say, have a picture of something on the cave wall, you can see, like, for example, that looks like it's a bison, but doesn't tell you what in a particular language. So that would not be language. Whereas you're looking at, say, the Rosetta Stone, which is sort of a key to understanding several different languages. That's telling you the correspondence between those languages I mean, those symbols in the language. So thanks for that. Good question. Okay, so in finishing up and if you have any more questions, please submit them. I will be happy to answer them. I'm still trying to get the hang of this whole Facebook Live thing. Please do visit my sponsor, which is thegreatcoursesplus.com Ginger, you don't have to spend any money, but I get a little bit of credit if you, if you click through, at least they think you're listening and maybe they'll want to keep being a sponsor. So that helps me out if you can do that. Now, next month, the Facebook Live session is due to be on, I think it's the 1st of November. Yeah, it's going to be on the 1st of November, Thursday, the 1st of November at 8:00pm and Central Time. And the thing that's going to be challenging about that is the fact that I'm actually going to be in Boston at Harvard anyway. Great, Jonathan, great to have you here. And everybody else, what is the secret of the brain in your view? Oh, wow, that's a good one. I love that question, but I, I think it's kind of a little broad. I don't have a view of what the secret of the brain is unless you want to ask me do I think. I think it's more about networks than modules. That might be an answer. I don't think it's about where stuff happens in the brain. I think it's about who's talking to who neuronally. That's why almost all the neuroscientists have moved away from asking, well, where does this happen in the brain? To which parts of the brain are involved? And I was reading a little bit of Dr. Wolf's new book today and she was talking about how once you really get going in reading and you're looking at the brain, it's everywhere, all of your brain. If you're doing a good job of reading, you're using all of it. There's certain parts that you use for the visual processing, but then once you start thinking about what you're reading, more is involved. And David McDivitt, who I know is a long term listener, has said, we exist, we have a brain. That's the secret. I'm quoting you, David, because I'm going to use this audio, you know, for the premium subscribers and Patreon supporters that get this audio as extra content. So I want them to know what you said. I didn't read off everybody's question. I'm going to get better at that. But I think there's an element of truth to your comment in the sense that we wouldn't be who we are without our brains, and I wouldn't have this show if it wasn't for our brains. So anyway, as I was saying, next month's Facebook Live will hopefully come to you live from Harvard in Boston, and I haven't figured out exactly how I'm going to do the technology of that yet, so I may end up on my phone or something. So if it doesn't come out quite as good as usual, you'll know and I am going to be about to sign off. Thanks guys for listening. I really appreciate it and I look forward to talking to you soon. By the way, the October episode of Brain Science is going to be another interview with Seth Grant, and those of you who have been listening for a while know that Seth is a fantastic guest. So I know you're going to want to check that out on the fourth Friday of October. See you later. Brain Science with Dr. Ginger Campbell is copyright 2018 to Virginia Campbell, MD. You can copy this show to share it with others, but for any other uses or derivatives, please contact me@brainsciencepodcastmail.com.