The Secret Life of a Brain
This week’s perspective paper is based on the theme of the brain v\s the mind. It is seen in the process of the brain sending messages and the mind processing it. Reading is the outcome in this case. It takes the brain the coordination of several processes to successfully read. Plasticity as a theme is also seen. The brain has the ability to change. Experience slowly changes the brain
The video showcases different aspects that the doctors are trying to learn about the brain. We see how the brain learns. It is made up of trillions of connections. The fascinating bit is that a child usually has twice as many connections as an adult. With time comes experience, which is the sculptor of the connections in the brain. It either takes away certain connections or decides to keep them. That is what learning is all about. It is changing the weight of the brain’s connections, all depending on the brain’s experience. A child’s brain is seen as plastic, a magnificent and flexible machine that learns how to crawl, walk, run, explore, pay attention, remember and make friends. The most fascinating one however, is when a child masters language.
For most people, speaking and reading is inevitable. It is important to note that reading is a high-wire balancing act performance by the brain. It usually demands sophisticated coordination of many parts of the brain. The coordination of reading in a child is very different from that one of an adult. It is because a child needs to put together a hundred concepts together.
Some children can read easily while others struggle to do so. Studies have shown that it has nothing to do with their ability to think or to reason. The ability to read comes from the correspondences between visual information and sounds that make up the words. Unlike language that is picked up naturally, reading has to be actively taught. Reading means letter naming, letter perception, word perception, recognizing words and comprehension. All these activities usually utilize different parts of the brain. Reading demands that the brain cobbles together several functions like vision, hearing and judgment in rapid fire all at once. A child who has begun to read sets off a complex series of reactions in the brain. It starts with the brain actively focusing its attention on the task of reading. It then captures the visual representation of the letter then sends it to the brain areas where the visual symbols get hooked to the letter’s meaning and sound. The letter is then articulated.
However, when one of those processes is interrupted, reading becomes impossible. An example being eight-year-old Russel who suffers from dyslexia. He is unable to translate the squiggles on the page to sound and meaning. Dyslexic people lack the ability to learn to process written language regardless of their adequate sensory exposure and intelligence. They are not able to understand that a word is made up of several sounds. Russell enrolls into a program that helps dyslexic children learn. It targets to take sounds from a word, pull them apart, put them back together, and add conscious attention to what they feel when they produce a particular sound when they say it. This understanding will help them have improved reading.