Thinking Beyond Science

The human brain is highly adaptable. To learn a language babies start by listening. At birth and sometime after, babies have incredible ability to hear differences between all the sounds used in world’s languages. At that stage, the child is referred to as ‘citizen of the world’.

At 7 months they are still ‘citizen of the world’, but by the time they reach 11 months they are citizen of a single country. They listen and learn from their parents, the language they speak. By adult age we are not perceiving reality, we are not responding to the real differences present in the sound, but we are listening to filters that were developed early in our lives as we mapped the sound of language our parents spoke.

In nearly all adults, language finds it’s home in the left cerebral hemisphere. But an year old baby listen and understand with both the brain hemispheres. By 20 months, the language center of brain starts to shift to the left hemisphere. If the left hemisphere of the brain is removed due to damage, the right hemisphere seems to do every bit as good as job in understanding spoken speech as left hemisphere. But more of the right hemisphere is required to support language than the left hemisphere in an intact brain.

Reading does not happens so easily. It is an example of one of the most complex everyday human cognitive processes we have. In reading different scripts, we use different aspect of the brain. To read, the brain must put together a variety of parts that evolved for other purposes like vision, hearing, judgement, memory. All come into play in a rapid fire overlapping processes. There are about 17 different regions in brain which are involved in reading.

For a child who is just learning to read, even a single letter will set off a complex series of reaction. The brain begins by focusing it’s  attention on the reading task, then it captures the visual representation of the letter and send it to areas of brain, where visual symbol gets hooked up to the letter’s sound and formation.

Dyslexia is the in ability to learn and process the written language. Brains of dyslexic children are not active in areas responsible for dissecting words into their constituent sound. They do not understand the concept that one word may be made up of several sounds.