Curriculum specialists years ago, recognized the value of a liberal arts education because courses outside the area of concentration, your major, would make you 'well-rounded' and value scholarship as you became aware of the broad academic world of content areas. O'Sullivan carries that further by showing that more complicated reading forces the brain to work in varied regions to ponder multiple ideas and formulate meaning that is subsequently processed as memory for future interpretation. She and Berns are saying that focused reading gives meaning to characters and words resulting in a greater awareness of the human condition, the latitude of emotions and values, and consequently makes us more empathetic creatures. The idea is that the college graduate has sufficient opportunities to nurture those cognitive processes as they examine complex texts, becoming not only proficient in their area of concentration, but higher levels of social reasoning and better human beings.
For
one, learning cursive integrates regions of the brain associated with
sensation, controlled movement, and thinking. The child uses fine motor skills
as the fingers grasp and manipulate the implement, an extension of the thinking
process as ideas are formulated, and then decides how it will be recorded on
paper. Karin James, professor of psychological and brain sciences at Indiana
University, had preliterate, five-year old children print, type, and trace
letters and shapes, and scanned with fMRI when they were later shown images of
the items. Though their clumsy replications were what you would expect of first
trials, the writing circuit in both hemispheres of their brains was significantly
activated when the children performed handwriting and not typing or tracing. It
was the same "reading network" observed when adults write,
particularly the fusiform gyrus and posterior parietal regions of the brain.
More... Click
More... Click
Berns GS, Blaine K,
Preitula MJ, and Pye B., (2016). Short- and Long-Term Effects of a Novel on
Connectivity in the Brain. Brain
Connectivity.
O'Sullivan, N., Davis,
P., Billington, J., Gonzalez-Diaz, V., Corcoran, R., (December 2015) “Shall I
compare thee”: The neural basis of literary awareness, and its benefits to
cognition, Cortex, Volume 73, 144–157.
James, K.H. and
Engelhardt, L. (2013). The effects of
handwriting experience on functional brain development in pre-literate
children. Trends in Neuroscience and
Education.
photo: woodley wonder works static flickr
photo: woodley wonder works static flickr
