from Part III - Brain, language, and mathematics
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
Overview
Cognitive neuroscience points the way beyond disputes pitting biological causes for behavior against cultural, experiential ones. Dehaene argues compellingly that the cultural tools of reading and arithmetic build directly on fundamental brain processes that are present in infants and other mammals. Common ideas in debates about learning and education seem old-fashioned and outmoded from this viewpoint – ideas such as that the mind/brain is a blank slate at birth, that there are innate, fixed mental organs, and that the brain is a learning machine capable of learning almost anything. The evidence is particularly clear regarding elementary numbers in arithmetic and the forms of letters in the alphabet. Specific, small cortical areas in the parietal lobe in primates and human infants are essential components for automatically detecting numerosity, even though has been no experience with the Arabic symbols for numbers. Indeed, there are even specific neurons tuned to different quantities from 1 to 5. Lesions in these areas produce acalculia (a number deficit). For reading, some restricted visual areas are dedicated to object recognition and to minute details of forms in space, invariant to size, position, or symmetry. These networks seem to form the foundation for building letter shapes, thus setting up the potential for children to learn the alphabet. Lesions in these areas produce alexia or dyslexia. For both mathematics and literacy, cultural objects (numbers and letters) make use of pre-existing brain architectures. In this way education can be understood as a ‘neuronal recycling process’ that builds on cortical structures.
The Editors
To save this book to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle.
Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.
Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Dropbox.
To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.