We like to think that information travels the world at the speed of light, but this is not the case with books. It took a personal visit and invitation by Dame Rachel De Sousa to make E.D. Hirsch’s work, originally in book form, widely known in the UK. Some key texts, notably Nobel laureate Eric Kandel’s In Search of Memory, are still little known here.
The latest example I’ve met is Dr Sally Shaywitz’ Overcoming Dyslexia, based on the work of the Yale Centre for the Study of Learning and Attention.
Yale pioneered the use of MRI scanning, and the evidence in Chapter 6 of this book explains why some highly intelligent people who have overcome dyslexia still read slowly – they rely on frontal areas of the brain, which are used for decoding, rather than on what Dr Shaywitz terms the “word form area”, a form of long-term memory, in which information about specific words – eg the difference between should and shoulder – is stored, allowing us to read words without working them out from scratch. Decoding, which is based on phonics, is the key to the early stages of learning to read. The word form area stores the knowledge of variations that enables us to build on this and develop fluent reading in English.