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novapsycheStudying Hyperlexia May Unlock How Brains Read
Understanding hyperlexia may . . . help explain how normal brains accomplish the feat of reading. Unlike seeing and hearing, skills acquired through evolution, reading is usually not acquired naturally. Humans have been reading for only a few thousand years, and the pressure for everyone to become good readers has become intense in only the past couple of centuries.
Reading involves a complex series of brain activities: Visual centers must first perceive variable, tiny features of printed symbols on a page, then those changes must be mentally converted into strings of sound, and finally the patterns of sound must be interpreted by language centers in the brain to register their meaning.
"Hyperlexia is the antithesis of dyslexia," said Guinevere Eden, director of Georgetown University's Center for the Study of Learning, who has studied Alex. "We spend all our time studying individuals who have a hard time learning to read, and here are these children who acquire reading in a spontaneous way. It's as if they know it already."
[...] In a paper published in the journal Neuron in January, the researchers reported that the Bethesda youngster had heightened brain activity in two areas, according to lead author Turkeltaub. One area was the left interior frontal gyrus, located behind the middle of the temple, the other was the left superior temporal cortex, over and behind the ear.
"If you're reading a word that you've never seen before, you need to first translate the letters into sounds, and then put those sounds together to make a whole word," Turkeltaub said in an e-mail. "In your brain, the left superior temporal cortex will translate the letters to sounds, and the left inferior frontal gyrus will put those sounds together to create the whole word."
Understanding hyperlexia may . . . help explain how normal brains accomplish the feat of reading. Unlike seeing and hearing, skills acquired through evolution, reading is usually not acquired naturally. Humans have been reading for only a few thousand years, and the pressure for everyone to become good readers has become intense in only the past couple of centuries.
Reading involves a complex series of brain activities: Visual centers must first perceive variable, tiny features of printed symbols on a page, then those changes must be mentally converted into strings of sound, and finally the patterns of sound must be interpreted by language centers in the brain to register their meaning.
"Hyperlexia is the antithesis of dyslexia," said Guinevere Eden, director of Georgetown University's Center for the Study of Learning, who has studied Alex. "We spend all our time studying individuals who have a hard time learning to read, and here are these children who acquire reading in a spontaneous way. It's as if they know it already."
[...] In a paper published in the journal Neuron in January, the researchers reported that the Bethesda youngster had heightened brain activity in two areas, according to lead author Turkeltaub. One area was the left interior frontal gyrus, located behind the middle of the temple, the other was the left superior temporal cortex, over and behind the ear.
"If you're reading a word that you've never seen before, you need to first translate the letters into sounds, and then put those sounds together to make a whole word," Turkeltaub said in an e-mail. "In your brain, the left superior temporal cortex will translate the letters to sounds, and the left inferior frontal gyrus will put those sounds together to create the whole word."