It is a common misconception among neuroscientists and cognitive psychologists that reading is a kind of brainwashing that leaves us defenceless in the face of the alphabet’s 26 letters.
People with reading literacy may quickly absorb information from printed text by just scanning it. When I put a word or two in front of your eyes, your brain does it for you whether you want to read them or not. When you see the words down below, try not to read it. Rather of reading the words, just look at them. Just how easy is it?
Compared to labelling photographs of individuals, reading is a far more efficient use of time. Try to quickly and accurately identify each of the pictures below. You wouldn’t argue that identifying photographs is completely instinctive, would you? Even though you may be rather quick (the assignment would take the average person around 10 seconds to complete, compared to 3-5 seconds if the photos were words), you’d still be surprised at how long it takes the average person to complete.
An instructive example of how this problem is addressed is provided by the Stroop paradigm (see below). Try to pinpoint the word’s hue as rapidly as possible (regardless of what it says). Unfortunately, you have to read the phrase and its description first, which distracts you from describing the ink’s colour. If you’ve learned to read, you can’t help but keep reading.
We can’t believe that reading has become easier while naming has gotten harder; it was always the other way around when we were youngsters. You can’t put a halt to a child’s education by preventing them from reading. It may be seen as a kind of “brainwashing” given that we were not given the opportunity to make our own decisions.
Glutamate and aspartate, two of the most common neurotransmitters, have the potential to boost the electrical activity of neurons, whilst glycine and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) have the potential to lower the electrical activity of neurons.
Synaptic pruning is a term that describes the process through which the brain gets rid of connections between neurons that aren’t essential. The structures in the brain known as synapses are what make it possible for one neuron to send an electrical or chemical signal to another cell. One possible method of communication between neurons is via the use of synapses. It is believed that the brain gets rid of connections that are not being utilised via a process called synaptic pruning.
a stage of neurodevelopment that may begin before birth and last far into the second decade of life; it is characterised by the elimination of the connections between neurons that are the least strong. In the field of schizophrenia research, there is the working hypothesis that certain manifestations of the condition may be caused by premature or excessive pruning.
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