Does smell or hearing also read with sight?
When we read, the brain interconnects sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch...
How? And how does he know?
Anyone who reads and has felt their senses stimulated by what they are reading knows this in a mysterious way; but which has a rational and evolutionary explanation.
Damásio explained here that the brain is a network that connects all its areas.
In my essay I inquire about the origins of neuroscientific research and how it began with the study of the distinction of brain specialization in areas, such as Broca's for language.
After a stroke - you explain - does exercising the senses recover that of reading?
This interconnection of the senses, which I refer to in detail in that case from the 19th century, is the result of our evolution, from the amoeba to being mammals: all the senses were the same before our brain evolved by specializing them.
Can a kiss improve your hearing?
Because the senses are interconnected. I believe in the power of the hands, the face, the touch, the lips, the kisses and the ties between them all..., which reinforces the reading.
Are synesthesias the expression of that ancestral brain of ours?
The combinatory capacity of the prefrontal areas allows us to interconnect senses. That's why if, when you say something to someone, you hold their hand, it will give them an intensity that you won't achieve with words alone: try it.
By exercising one sense do I improve them all?
Yes, because they are interconnected from their primordial origin. And by reading, we exercise this interconnectivity.
The best writers appeal to all the senses in texts that smell or sound...
It is the essence of poetry. And perhaps the best image of the evolution of reasoning and the senses is that of 2001: A space odyssey when the anthropoid throws a femur into the air and transforms into a spaceship...
That scene synthesizes a million years of evolution of human experience.
Well, that bone is a book and it is writing and reading, which give us immense power and infinite possibilities. They are a gigantic growing memory prosthesis.
Will artificial intelligence top it off?
Mathematicians are used to creating algorithms to transform other algorithms and this is what generative artificial intelligence does, which accelerates interconnection in networks like reading in the brain.
Aren't you afraid of accusations of intrusiveness by neuroscientists and computer scientists?
We should all be more interconnected and thus increase our knowledge, as our evolution shows.
What does a stroke of the last century teach us?
For me, recounting it has been an intellectual adventure, because what is a diagnosis but a narrative? What doctors do is to give a sense of time to each disease and that narrative articulates and hierarchizes symptoms, causes and effects until healing...
...Oh to the dead.
Against which we use another narrative.
Of religions and transcendence.
But, deep down, artificial intelligence and its chats do nothing but automatically build those narratives, in the same way that algorithms are narratives of calculation, and now they are articulated in a program that learns to create discourses. Therefore, children with reading comprehension problems...
severe handicap
...They only suffer from perception problems and to overcome them they must exercise their senses, all the interconnected senses.
Why have some children lost this ability to perceive?
They are not helped by the excess of information in circulation, which already reaches them filtered through the networks and thus prevents them from the effort and the benefit of moving from the letter to the meaning - of internalizing the text - and no longer does the its biology through the thalamus to pass into consciousness.
Too much mobile and not enough books?
In addition, during adolescence certain brain structures are not fully built and this superficial reading to which they are accustomed requires little effort and is not enough to understand demanding texts.
Too easy, fast, superficial and ephemeral.
More books for everyone and fewer networks: yes. Reading requires an immediate ability to analyze the construction to understand the statements. If you acquire it, you are able to understand texts from any subject.
First subject among all: reading?
And not just for school: reading exercises the most difficult but most useful brain muscle to improve: that of attention.
To concentrate is to begin to understand?
It is the hidden value of reading: it promotes concentration and slows down brain degeneration. Reading is keeping the brain fit: the best investment in health.
