Neuronal Recycling Hypothesis: 1. Beginning of the story

2009/12/12 at 9:30 pm | Posted in Cognition, Language, Research, Teaching, Thought | Leave a comment

Almost a decade ago, I nearly engaged in the study of the number sense because of Stanislas Dehaene‘s wonderful introduction. This year he collected his and other reading researchers’ findings into the book “Reading in the Brain“. He attempts to build a theory covering the recent understanding across the behavioral experiments, the computational modeling, and the neuroscience on the reading.

I’d like to say his book is absolutely the best recommendation for the students who are searching the entry to the research of reading. His major claim atop all the topics in this book emphasizes the reading as the crystal of neural systems and cultures during generations of evolution. The core of his “neural recycling hypothesis” directs to that the reading capacities possessed by the modern human have been equipped in human gene pool generations ago. Since the first literature system was created, a variety of perished and alive cultures have developed the potential of these “language genes”. Every language loaded one reading culture in the world have a diverse variation on the spectrum of “phonological transcoding“. Inside the brains of these language users, the accumulated studies have revealed an “universal neural circuit” installed with a small accommodation  for the cultural specificity. This is the first branch of evidence supporting the universal basis of the human languages. Dehanas’ second support come from the single cell studies of primate vision. The words that could be encoded by the readers’ brain of a language have the “perceptual advantage” which could easily activate the specific neurons in the human and apes brains.

These are the brief story of the first three chapters of this book and the keystone of the “neuronal recycling”. Realizing this hypothesis is helpful to wave the recent top reading studies together. On the other hand, the first three chapters illustrate Dehanas’ perspectives on the human cognition and culture: nature is priority to nurture; natural constraints decide the development of culture; the neural circuit serving human language have been matured thounds of years ago. You should be familiar with these perspectives if you have routinely recieved  the news of the evolutional psychology, which have been criticized from the ontological to the empidemic problems. I will do a series of critical thinking on Dehanas’ perspectives in the following articles.