Technology, Reading and Writing, and Learning Disabilities discussion  
list colleagues,

How does the brain read? Much like when you type a text message on a  
mobile phone, and it  predicts the word you want from just a few  
letters!

A new study published on Wednesday in the prestigious British journal  
Nature, one based on teaching adults to read, sheds some light on what  
parts of the brain are used, and how they might function, in the  
reading process.
.... Researchers from Spain, Colombia and Britain seized a golden  
chance to find out more, thanks to 20 former rebels in Colombia who  
took part in an adult literacy course to help them reintegrate  
society. After the volunteers had become literate, magnetic resonance  
imaging (MRI) scans of their brains were compared with those from 22  
illiterates who were matched for age and cultural background. The new  
readers had a higher density of so-called grey matter, where  
information processing is carried out, in several areas of the left  
hemisphere of the brain, the investigators found. Previous research  
has already determined that these areas are responsible for  
recognizing the shapes of letters and translating the letters into  
speech sounds and deriving a meaning from them. Reading also boosted  
neural connections, known as white matter, between the different  
regions of grey matter. The team took the findings a step further by  
looking at the brains of people who mastered reading in childhood.

The big discovery is the role of part of the brain called the angular  
gyrus. For almost a century and a half, the angular gyrus has been  
thought to recognize the shapes of visual words and then translate  
them into sounds and meanings. But, according to the new paper, the  
angular gyrus plays an intermediary part, providing predictions of  
what the brain will see. "The traditional view has been that the  
angular gyrus acts as a 'dictionary' that translates the letters of a  
word into a meaning," said Cathy Price, a professor at University  
College London, in a press release. "In fact, we have shown that its  
role is more in anticipating what our eye will see -- more akin to the  
predictive texting function on a mobile phone." The investigation  
could unlock understanding into the causes of dyslexia, the  
researchers hope.


http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hRIGSAUYA4EpVoIVIt8-W539apTw

Also see

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/6326497/Brain-has-its-own-predictive-text-function.html


David J. Rosen
DJRosen at theworld.com




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