Notlar
Rita Carter
The brain changes as it is not a natural thing to read and write.
Human brain was built for smelling, hearing but when faced with a new challenge, reading, it rearranged its existing parts.
Early humans discriminated animal tracks, wild animals, and primitive weapons. All required honing the visual skills.
Hippocampus works in knowing the space we are in. Cab drivers use it quite frequently. So hippocampus of Londn cab driwers were significantly larger than the ordinary people. So brain arranges itself according to the requirements. Reshapes, restructures itself.
A man of 60 age suddenly loses reading ability. He can read the letters but they don’t evoke a word or image in his mind. Just like looking at another language. The reason was a stroke.
Doctors searched for the responsible area in his brain by MRI.
Some patients, after stroke, looks at word yacht and sees it as food. No connection again.
A lot of areas of the brain were found to be involved in those studies. Not one big chunk. No reading center, but a highly complex network.
Because reading is not a normal human activity, parts of brain involved in reading also do other things.
Pronounciation is very hard in English. The brain builds a complex modification to itself as it learns a hard new language.
Brain accomodates with your intellectual skills just like muscles of a bodybuilderdo. In other words, use it or lose it.
Electroencephalograph – elektroankefalograf okunur
If the brain is intrigued by the meaning of a word, it sends out distinct electrical response. (400msecs after reading the word = N400)
If the grammar intrigues brain, sends out signals after 600msecs = P600 (that’s odd but it means something)
N400 brain signal : says “that doesn’t make any sense, nonsense” = Semantic error eg: “They thought so well of the hero that they printed him”
Brain response to syntatic errors and meaning error. These appear to be separate processes.
P600 response from brain: no violation of meaning
A test: examining response against sentences of different grammar and sense characteristics.
While reading normal sentence both in sense and grammar. Brain signals are baseline (saying that its normal)
“They thought so well of the hero that they candled him.” Demonstrated both N400 and P600
“They thought so well of the hero that they godded him” gives out fundamentally p600 effect. Message is: Grammatical issue at hand. Cause in this sentence shakespeare creates a verb from a noun.
So it seems, shakespeare used these odd different words every so often, in order to make the reader not relax for long. Thrwe oddball words now and hten to keeo the suspense.
Comment of the literature prof: this is like an evolutionary tool, the brain encountered many odd and strange situations during reading the shajespeare pieces, and subsequently evolves to overcome them, adapt to them, it primes the mind for difficulties, prepares mind to be able to take different pathways from the obvious or ordinary ones. So shakespeare literally electrifies the brain a lot. He frequently turns a noun into a verb.
Fictional works may indeed be the most energetic cerebral workouts.
Phrenology – Charlotte Bronte was curious about this craze of 19th century. Concocting characteristics of a person by the bumps in one’s head.
Reading brings about empathy, its not just reading or learning. Novels make you symphatize with other people.
Amygdala is thought to be heavily involved in emotions. But also play a role when you try to understand others’ emotions.
Dancing movements are controlled by motor cortex of brain. But even when we watch those action in other people, the same region fires up in us. Other people’s actions are mirrored in our own brains. Not only dancing and motorcortex; music, climbing, talking as well.
So our own brain does the things we watch as well. (Bara: interesting, think about horror movies)
Bara: Brain undergoes an evolutionary path and changes in Western civilization. Eg: first their brain get used to reading and formed itself accordingly, then came the others, in the 3rd world, people jump into the futher steps without completing the very first, reading. That may be causing new diseases and behavior pathologies.
Mirror neurons
When we read or see omeone scratching his head, involuntarly our hand aims to the same. Empathy in action.
Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is used for mapping out the active areas of brain while reading or watching. The action words (verbs) appear and disappear and together they form sentences. Meanwhile, they observe the areas firing up in your brain as the words go on. On the screen those areas light up.
Other people’s actions are mirrored in our brains to a certain degree.
Empathy in action: when a human grabs a banana, monkey tries to grab too.
The reader becomes the book and the book becomes the reader.
Humans – interdependent species.
Reading provides much more than mere transfer of knowledge. It muscles up the empathy network in brain.
Bara: Gene leap, genlerimiz büyük ölçüde grand parents ağırlıklı şekilleniyor olabilir mi? despite our parent? Quite interesting thought!!!
Reading gives us rehearsal stage. We edit, and rehearse events of real life in our brain.
There are also therapeutic book groups for people with psychological problems in England.
Reading is the best antidepressant for some.
Our neural circuits change as we read.
Bara: We face the structure of another brain when reading a book. So our brain tries to know it and pick some traits of it. Books are like brain maps of other people. We read them and evlve around htem as we read. We explore different opportunities and brain structures which we quickly adapt.
In 2005, 218 million books were bought in England.
30% rise since mid 1990s
Vox Pops = sokaktaki adamın görüşleri, man on the street interview, MOTS
Usually the interviewees are shown in public places, and supposed to be giving spontaneous opinions in a chance encounter — unrehearsed persons, not selected in any way
Some say video games give no empathy but some say they do. There is one thing certain, video games reduce reading rates among teenagers.
