Humans are born with brains ‘prewired’ to see words

Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study suggests. Analyzing brain scans of newborns, researchers found that this part of the brain — called the ‘visual word form area’ (VWFA) — is connected to the language network of the brain.

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Tau.Neutrino said:

Humans are born with brains ‘prewired’ to see words

Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study suggests. Analyzing brain scans of newborns, researchers found that this part of the brain — called the ‘visual word form area’ (VWFA) — is connected to the language network of the brain.

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what if the language doesn’t use letters, is it not a true language

from link

the “visual word form area” (VWFA) — is connected to the language network of the brain.

“The VWFA is specialized to see words even before we’re exposed to them,” Saygin said.

“It’s interesting to think about how and why our brains develop functional modules that are sensitive to specific things like faces, objects, and words,” said Li, who is lead author of the study.

SCIENCE said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Humans are born with brains ‘prewired’ to see words

Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study suggests. Analyzing brain scans of newborns, researchers found that this part of the brain — called the ‘visual word form area’ (VWFA) — is connected to the language network of the brain.

more…

what if the language doesn’t use letters, is it not a true language

like this ?

Which languages do not use an alphabet?
https://www.quora.com/Which-languages-do-not-use-an-alphabet

imagine that, brains have structure, structures, that perform functions, possibly even modularity

a revolutionary idea

I like this work.

It occurred to me long ago that saccadic eye motion together with high contrast rapid changes in brightness with position (like edges of letters) will stimulate the brain’s reward centre, encouraging reading.

But that leaves open the problem of why cats don’t read. It could be that such high rates of brain optical stimulus in cats leads to nausea, and is therefore avoided.

So why should high brain activity in one animal lead to addiction and in the same region in another animal lead to nausea? An open question.

mollwollfumble said:

I like this work.

It occurred to me long ago that saccadic eye motion together with high contrast rapid changes in brightness with position (like edges of letters) will stimulate the brain’s reward centre, encouraging reading.

But that leaves open the problem of why cats don’t read. It could be that such high rates of brain optical stimulus in cats leads to nausea, and is therefore avoided.

So why should high brain activity in one animal lead to addiction and in the same region in another animal lead to nausea? An open question.

Fine line between pleasure and pain

Tau.Neutrino said:

SCIENCE said:

Tau.Neutrino said:

Humans are born with brains ‘prewired’ to see words

Humans are born with a part of the brain that is prewired to be receptive to seeing words and letters, setting the stage at birth for people to learn how to read, a new study suggests. Analyzing brain scans of newborns, researchers found that this part of the brain — called the ‘visual word form area’ (VWFA) — is connected to the language network of the brain.

more…

what if the language doesn’t use letters, is it not a true language

like this ?

Which languages do not use an alphabet?
https://www.quora.com/Which-languages-do-not-use-an-alphabet

From quora. Very interesting.

I’m not totally convinced about some of these. Ancient Egyptian for instance is almost completely alphabetic.

symbol representation, like written words, requires encoding and decoding of, is encoding and decoding, information compression, related abstraction

so essentially some of the processing goes outside the brain, part of, can be externally manipulated, an externalization for processing it may be better said

which is interesting I reckon, when think about it, my impression is that’s a cool tool, or set of mind tools, quite an intimate relationship between internal mental tools and external tools

certainly finesse in word recognition, like the letters formed into words make a template, i’m seeing words formed into structures that have signature characteristics (are read so), and there is the automated word-concept (or object) associations also