The title
is certainly somehow confused, but here I'll explain you how I came up to this.
I am
advisor of a very intelligent woman who is studying musical cognition and her
work proposes a relationship between the processes of reading and writing music
and natural language. We have written a couple of articles which we hope to
publish soon, but while we were working with her thesis I made comments, and
about a paragraph I wrote her the following note: remember that our brain is not evolutionarily programmed for reading
and writing.
She knows
me very well and of course she has read my writings both scientific as my blog,
so I never could imagine that a simple comment would take us to a fascinating
explanation which I would like to share with all of you.
"Our brain
processes learning, including the process of reading and writing, tell me how
come is not evolutionarily programmed to do this?"
The
evolutionary process has led the species to acquire different skills, which
have taken thousands of years to become part of the system, and therefore
conquer a brain structure which command it.
Vision is
for example, a victory that has taken much more time to development than the
language. Each evolutionary triumph is a process of adaptation, which involves
different prototypes that never seems to arrive at the final product, since
nature makes adjustments depending on the environment, and although sometimes
we take for granted that we are born with our fabulous capabilities to understand the world but not all of them
have a genetic complement.
That is
the case of the reading and writing acquisition, it's not something even ontogeny arises from the moment of
birth, because children require at least between 4 and 6 years to start the
acquisition process, and many more years to consolidate it.
When we
think in terms of history of human evolution, we can see how language is a
process that requires hearing the
differences of every letter of the alphabet, and language recognition, and that
involved the development of hearing, and probably the first acoustic traits
were environmental, which allowed beginning to distinguish different sounds such
as rain, singing of birds or wild animal sounds, and through many years and
effort, led to the conquest of the language, which is, is a trophy of homo
sapiens, as some claim.
The
development of the vision began as is estimated around 600 million years ago in
vertebrates, maybe after hearing. If we think of the cosmic calendar that Carl
Sagan gave us to find life on Earth, we will be able to see that language arose
more or less in November and literacy, which involves integration of signs at
eye level and its relationship with the sounds of the alphabet, (see the sound
of language) I think arises around the last minute of December...
Babies can
listen through the medium within the womb, although hearing in an air
environment is different from the aquatic environment, even though a few days
old baby is able to recognize sounds, although it does not distinguish them,
and gradually begins the process to make differences with the sounds of the
language, to begin an amazing preparation to modulate it, repeat it and finally
begin to talk and conversations If this is culturally stimulated.
The same
should happen with the reading and writing process, since we can find find
people who know how to speak, but cannot read and write. This step requires
environmental stimulation and the reason is simple, the emergence of the
reading - writing, it was not an ability shared by all people, only a few had
access to learning and developing skill, the bulk of the population had no
access to the alphabet, books or writing.
With the
arrival of Gutenberg's printing press, many more people could have access to
the books, provided they could pay them... so it took many years before
literacy became a learning with open access among the population, but if we
think that this happened at the last
moment of December 31st in the Cosmic Calendar, then is easier to understand
why our brain does not have sufficient
practice to develop it without help.
What my
student and I are exploring, is the way that our brain is using are sharing the
musical and natural language (We think music was first, and we have shared for
many thousands of years, so no one teaches us how to move hips when we heard
drums), and this same brain structures are shared by literacy, to conform
this new cognitive skill.
For this
reason that when a child has difficulties in the acquisition or consolidation
school learning process, we recommend to thinkabout baby steps, finally the
human specie has need thousands of years to learn and we never stop.
References:
Lamb, T., Collin,
SP., Pugh, Jr., e. (2007) Evolution of the vertebrate eye: opsin
photoreceptors, retine and eye cup. Nature
reviews Neuroscience, 8, 960-976.
Masterson,
B., Heffner, H., and Ravissa, r. (2005) The evolution of human hearing. The Journal of the Acoustical Society of
America. 45, 966.
Wright, S.
(1931) Evolution in Mendelian populations. Genetics.
Available at: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1201091/pdf/97.pdf
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