Need Different Brain Wiring?

Below are excerpts from an interesting column by Robert Lee Holtz in the May 2nd Wall Street Journal. It seems that learning Chinese as a child wires the brain differently than learning English does. The dynamics of learning written Chinese sound similar to those of a physical sport. A game of Zhongwen, anyone?


How the Brain Learns to Read Can Depend on the Language

For generations, scholars have debated whether language constrains the ways we think. Now, neuroscientists studying reading disorders have begun to wonder whether the actual character of the text itself may shape the brain.
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Among children raised to read and write Chinese, the demands of reading draw on parts of the brain untouched by the English alphabet, new neuroimaging studies reveal.
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To learn the ABCs of English, we essentially harness our listening skills to a phonetic code. To become literate in Chinese, however, we must make much heavier use of memory, motor control and visual-perception circuits located toward the front of the brain. Children can master the 6,000 or so Chinese characters used in Mandarin and Cantonese text only by laboriously copying them out over and over again, until each abstract form becomes second nature.
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Some social psychologists speculate that the brain changes caused by literacy could be involved in cultural differences in memory, attention and visual perception. In January's Psychological Science, MIT researchers reported that European-Americans and students from several East Asian cultures, for example, showed different patterns of brain activation when making snap judgments about visual patterns.

No one knows which came first: habits of thought or the writing system that gave them tangible form. A writing system could be drawn from the archaeology of the mind, perpetuating aspects of mental life conceived at the dawn of civilization.

"Once you have different writing systems in place," said University of Michigan social psychologist Richard Nisbett. "They may reinforce the perceptual and cognitive trends that preceded the invention of writing. They may go hand in glove."