Stanislas Dehaene

plastic organ whose learning capacity is so broad that it places no constraints on the scope of human activity.

John Locke, David Hume, and George Berkeley, who claimed that the human brain should be compared to a blank slate that progressively absorbs the imprint of man’s natural and cultural environment through the five senses.

brain’s architecture is similar in all members of the Homo sapiens family, and differs only slightly from that of other primates.

All over the world, the same brain regions activate to decode a written

call it the “neuronal recycling” hypothesis.

When foveal information is lacking, whether due to a retinal lesion, to a stroke having destroyed the central part of the visual cortex, or to an experimental trick

Arabic or Hebrew, where gaze scans the page from right to left, this asymmetry is reversed.12 In other writing systems such as Chinese, where character density is greater, saccades are shorter and visual span is reduced accordingly. Each reader thus adapts his visual exploration strategy to his language and script

we can immediately recognize the identity of “words,” “WORDS,” and “WoRdS,” it is because our visual system pays no attention to the contours of words or to the pattern of ascending and descending letters: