Research Reports – Part 3

 

Shouldn’t we think before accepting anything we read?

Since 2016 when I read that reading is biologically unnatural, I have disagreed with that statement.

This post illustrates that when one researcher says something many follow suit and repeat what they read. Some insist that we should accept these research reports or statements researchers make. 

Recently David Chalk commented on my post on LinkedIn: "Our brains have been wired hundreds of thousands of years to speak and interpret by hearing words, but there is no natural ability to read-attaching sounds to symbols-words."

He repeats what he has read from others such as Stanislas Dehaene and Pamela Snow.

The noted neuroscientist Stanislas Dehaene (2018) argues that there is no place or mechanism in the brain to accommodate the learning-to-read process, seemingly adding credence to the reading-is-unnatural assumption. Dehaene and other researchers point out that oral language has been around for 50,000 years, whereas written systems developed much later—as recently as 5,000 years ago.

Pamela Snow said the same thing in 2016. ‘Reading (and its corollary, writing) is a human contrivance that has existed for only approximately 6,000 years. This recency of reading as a human skill is important, because 6,000 years is a mere blink in evolutionary terms, and the human brain has not developed specialized neural pathways to support a skill that is widely agreed to be essential to successful living in first-world developed economies and to the social and economic trajectories of developing nations.’

Did you know that learning to read is not “biologically natural”? (Pamela Snow)

Many other researchers have repeated the above blindly.

For several years now, I have explained why if learning to speak is natural learning to read is also natural.

To be continued...