История письма и чтения. Асафова Г.К. - 139 стр.

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senses through which we acquire knowledge”. This much is obvious to any reader:

that letters are grasped through sight. But by what alchemy do these letters become

intelligible words? What takes place inside us when we are faced with the text?

What in fact, is the act we call reading?

There existed a lot of different theories. Beginning with Empedocles who

lived in the fifth century BC, Epicurus and Euclid who lived a century later, then

Medieval scholars Galen and Aristotle to Leonardo da Vinci (around the year

1508) – all were trying to understand how the surrounding objects were imprinted

in the memory and became more or less fixed.

The human mind, in Leonardo’s time, was seen as a small laboratory where

the material gathered in by the eyes, ears and other organs of perception became

“impressions” in the brain that were channelled through the centre of common

sense and then transformed into one or several faculties – such as memory – under

the influence of the supervising heart. But the fundamental question remained

unsolved.

In the modern study of neurolinguistics, the connection between brain and

language was made in 1865. That year, two French scientists, Michel Dax and Paul

Broca, suggested in simultaneous but separate studies that the vast majority of

humankind, as a result of a genetic process is born with a left cerebral hemisphere

that will eventually become the dominant part of the brain for encoding language.

A much smaller proportion, mostly left-handed people, develop this function in the

right cerebral hemisphere. In a few cases (in people genetically predisposed to a

dominant left hemisphere), early damage to the left hemisphere results in a cerebral

“reprogramming” and leads to development of the language function in the right

hemisphere. But neither hemisphere will act as encoder and decoder until the

person is actually exposed to language.

By the time the first scribe scratched and uttered the first letters, the human

body was already capable of the acts of writing and reading that still lay in the

future. That is to say, the body was able to store, recall and decipher all manner of

sensations, including the arbitrary signs of written language yet to be invented.