Educating the Brain: How the Acquisition of Reading and Mathematics Affects Human Brain Circuits – Seminars in Society and Neuroscience

• Free
• Science & Health

Speaker: Stanislas Dehaene, Professor and Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology, Collège de France; Director of the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit

The remarkable plasticity of the human brain allows it to acquire new abilities through schooling and education. Reading acquisition recycles several pre-existing visual and auditory areas in order to reorient them to the processing of letters and phonemes. Comparisons of literate and illiterate brains have revealed three major sites of enhancement due to schooling: the early visual cortex, the « visual word form area » (a region specializing for the visual recognition of letter strings) and the planum temporale (a region involved in phonological processing). Dr. Dehaene will present a novel longitudinal study in which we repeatedly scanned individual children every two months during the first year of school. The results paint a detailed picture of how the ventral visual cortex and associated language areas are changed, and how reading acquisition competes with the cortical representation of faces. Dr. Dehaene will also show how mathematics affects brain activity, particularly by enhancing the responsivity to numbers and mathematical expressions in ventral visual cortex.

Speaker and respondents will discuss the implications of this work and how our growing understanding of the neuroscience of reading and mathematics may have important consequences for education and other fields.

Italian Academy, Columbia University

Free and open to the public, but RSVP is required via Eventbrite.