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Reading: ventral route x dorsal stream

  Tags: Brain | Reading
 Language Learning Forum : General discussion Post Reply
12 messages over 2 pages: 1


jeff_lindqvist
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 Message 9 of 12
24 February 2015 at 7:55pm | IP Logged 
Learn a language in your car.
Learn a language in your sleep.
And now, Learn a language in your shower.

What's next? Learn a language while scuba diving?
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Serpent
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 Message 10 of 12
24 February 2015 at 8:50pm | IP Logged 
My longer posts specifically came with a disclaimer that learning in the shower is not enough. But it can be a useful addition.

Sorry for hijacking the thread by my casual mention. If you want to continue, let's move to the hidden moments thread and keep this one for what Expugnator described in the first post.
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Iversen
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 Message 11 of 12
25 February 2015 at 3:00pm | IP Logged 
I actually don't know the precise routes of these two pathways through the brain, but it seems to me that the dorsal route sounds like a cross between two different kinds of reading: 1) 'getting the gist' reading where you basically skip all the small insignificant words and make a valiant guess about the general meaning based on a few comprehensible 'meaning' words - mostly practiced by speed readers and by people who can't really read in a certain language yet, 2) trying to read and really understand a incomprehensible text through a combination of lookups and translations and guesswork - also mainly practiced by people who can't really read in a certain language yet, but also by competent readers fighting against adverse conditions (insufficient light, bad eyesight or Mr. Dehaene in the neighbourhood).

By the way, I try to force myself to read slowly and attentively by copying text in a format with space for new words to the right. If I just read along in a weak language I tend to get more and more lazy so that I effectively end up just guessing. And that may in itself be a relevant skill, but you don't learn the details of a language without caring about them.

Edited by Iversen on 25 February 2015 at 3:08pm

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mrwarper
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 Message 12 of 12
04 March 2015 at 10:37am | IP Logged 
Jonah Lehrer wrote:
Why is it so important to get some distance from one’s prose? Stanislas Dehaene, a neuroscientist at the College de France in Paris, has helped illuminate the neural anatomy of reading and editing.[...]
The second reading pathway — known as the dorsal stream — is turned on whenever you’re forced to pay conscious attention [...]
Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once an individual learns how to read, Dehaene’s research demonstrates that even literate adults are still occasionally forced to make sense of texts. Once that happens, they become more conscious of the words on the page.

I am as happy as the the next guy that we get to know what bits of our brains lit up while doing what, or if they cease or continue to work like that in children and adults, or after a process is automated -- after all, that's what science is about.

However, I find it deeply disturbing that research "demonstrates that even literate adults are still occasionally forced to make sense of texts. Once that happens, they become more conscious of the words on the page." Come on! Does anybody really get paid for such pearls of wisdom?

Expugnator wrote:
this excerpt led me to think immediately about language learning through extensive reading and my terrible results last year. I believe most of my reading happens through the ventral route [...] To this extent, this comparison/concept has been really insightful.

What do you people think? Is this conceptualization valid? Do you experience it similarly?

I think we shouldn't get too excited with stories about parts of the brain. After all, we move our hands without thinking of nerves, muscles, or the parts of our brains that control the whole process, don't we?

Introspection is the really important part here -- observe what you do in detail, pay attention to how you start to do things 'on autopilot' and see what trips you up and makes stuff stick or prevents it from happening.

In that regard, I find the first question very interesting.

We all make mistakes when writing, but as you write, you are --hopefully-- perfectly clear on what you intend to write. From my experience, I am more likely to spot mistakes in my own writing if I think about other stuff for "a while". My take on this is, what I intended to write floats around in my head for a while and is recalled so vividly that it effectively supersedes what I read, i.e. what I actually wrote. Once that fades, or I 'forget' about it, I don't recall anymore while reading -- I just try to make sense of what I read, like I would with any other text, and my own mistakes become visible again.

Edit: that's exactly why you can see I edit many of my posts for typos and wording after I write them :)


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