Speaker 1: Have you been seeing all this stuff going on with
Speaker 1: the USPS?
Speaker 2: Yes, honey, I am disgusted.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the USPS is so critical to everything. I don't understand,
Speaker 1: like how we can even be considering moving this money
Speaker 1: around and not giving it to them, Like how are
Speaker 1: we going to even function? I can't imagine life without
Speaker 1: the USPS.
Speaker 2: Yes, and you know I love to send a letter.
Speaker 2: Everybody and my family worked at the post office growing up,
Speaker 2: so I am wed to the post office. I used
Speaker 2: to collect stamps as a kid. Okay, so yes, I
Speaker 2: used to collect stamps, stamps, and X Men cars. Those
Speaker 2: are the things I collected. I collected POGs, Oh, I
Speaker 2: remember those. Yes, I know what you were supposed to
Speaker 2: do with them.
Speaker 1: I didn't know. I just had a little tupperware container
Speaker 1: full of them, just looked at them and that was it.
Speaker 2: I think the pog came before the beanie baby, right.
Speaker 1: I think so. And I didn't have a single beanie baby.
Speaker 1: Do y'all still have y'all beanie babies?
Speaker 2: They're dusty if you still have them, I know that
Speaker 2: unless you are they machine washable.
Speaker 1: Don't they got beans on the inside?
Speaker 2: All those beans come out?
Speaker 1: You got enough beans? To make a bean back chair.
Speaker 1: Repurpose those things you reduce, reuse, recycle. I'm t T
Speaker 1: and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify. This is dope Labs.
Speaker 2: Everybody's talking about buying stamps and showing their books to stamps.
Speaker 2: My favorite stamp right now is the Marvin Gaye stamp.
Speaker 2: It's hard to find them. It's hard to find.
Speaker 1: I'm just this is something I did not know about
Speaker 1: my friend, and it makes complete sense.
Speaker 2: Actually, you haven't been paying attention to the stamps.
Speaker 1: I send you no Okay, so zakiya. When anything big
Speaker 1: happens or anything that she feels like is significant in
Speaker 1: your life, she will send you a really really nice
Speaker 1: card with a note in it. I still have some
Speaker 1: of them where she's saying congratulations, I'm so proud of you,
Speaker 1: handwritten everything, so so nice. But I have never paid
Speaker 1: attention to the stamp.
Speaker 2: What the stamp is always on brand, it's on themes. Okay,
Speaker 2: you need to go back. If you have those envelopes,
Speaker 2: I do not post at these for the postcards you
Speaker 2: should be able to see.
Speaker 1: Okay, well, I don't have the envelopes, but I trust
Speaker 1: that they were on brand because the card itself was
Speaker 1: always on Brandy. I always had a black woman on
Speaker 1: the front. They're always very, very good. So let's talk
Speaker 1: about why folks have been stepping up to support the USPS.
Speaker 2: The post Office, or the United States Postal Service, is
Speaker 2: operated by the federal government, and for many years it's
Speaker 2: been operating at a deficit. So that's like a business
Speaker 2: is running and you're not turn a profit. But the
Speaker 2: thing to remember is that most federal agencies operated as
Speaker 2: a deficit in. The post Office is the only one
Speaker 2: that doesn't get money from the government to operate, and
Speaker 2: so it was really hit hard. Just like we talked
Speaker 2: about individuals taking a loss in a really bad financial
Speaker 2: hit from coronavirus, the post Office had the same thing.
Speaker 1: And then on top of all of that, we get
Speaker 1: a new Postmaster General who says that he's going to
Speaker 1: be using these cost cutting mechanisms and that would limit
Speaker 1: the reach of the USPS.
Speaker 2: So basically, our postal service is in trouble.
Speaker 1: One of the ways you can support the USPS is
Speaker 1: by sending more letters, and for me, that's kind of
Speaker 1: like a double his sword. I want to support the USPS,
Speaker 1: but I really hate my handwriting, so I don't want
Speaker 1: to do that. And my printer is out of ink,
Speaker 1: so typing something up is kind of like out of
Speaker 1: the question. I need to pray just more ink. And
Speaker 1: I don't want people to know what my handwriting looks like.
Speaker 1: I go to great lengths to shield everyone from my handwriting.
Speaker 2: Everybody join me in this moment of lifting tt in
Speaker 2: that handwriting up.
Speaker 1: Once you see it, you're gonna put it right back down.
Speaker 2: I welcome those bubble letters.
Speaker 1: See, I don't want to be described as someone that
Speaker 1: had that writes in bubble letters like I'm not eight,
Speaker 1: I'm not eight years old.
Speaker 2: I'm a girl. That's the way I'm saying it. Those
Speaker 2: voluptuous strokes. What about that?
Speaker 1: Your handwriting thick with two c's okay? So our question
Speaker 1: is about our writing because since we're going to be
Speaker 1: supporting the USPS more, it got us thinking about writing,
Speaker 1: different people's writing styles, how we learn to write, and
Speaker 1: so we just had more questions than answers, and so
Speaker 1: we thought we would dig into it.
Speaker 2: Take it to the experts. Today's lab is about written languages,
Speaker 2: specifically alphabetic.
Speaker 1: Languages with alphabetic languages like English, Greek, or Russian, each
Speaker 1: written symbol corresponds to an individual sound. The difference between
Speaker 1: alphabetic and non alphabetic systems is that non alphabetic languages
Speaker 1: have written symbols that correspond to larger groups of sound,
Speaker 1: like syllables or whole words like Chinese. Let's get into
Speaker 1: the recitation. What do we know? We know writing is important, yes,
Speaker 1: and we know that everybody writes differently. I think that's it.
Speaker 1: I think that's all that we know about about handwriting sadly,
Speaker 1: So what do we want to know?
Speaker 2: I think I need to know more about how we
Speaker 2: actually learn to write, what's happening in our brains?
Speaker 1: Yeah, And I want to know the history of writing,
Speaker 1: because I mean, it's definitely changed over time, I think.
Speaker 1: And so I just want to know, like how it
Speaker 1: all started and how we got to this place that
Speaker 1: we are now.
Speaker 2: And I think the million dollar question, you know, we
Speaker 2: see it in different places. Does handwriting have much meaning?
Speaker 2: Does it say something about who you are? Right?
Speaker 1: Because I would like to believe that the way that
Speaker 1: I write and the judgment I receive is unfounded, like
Speaker 1: no base and those two things don't there's no connection.
Speaker 2: Whoever's judging TT you need to stop it right.
Speaker 1: Now, it's probably mostly me judging myself, Like I'll write
Speaker 1: a sentence, I'll be like, oh girl, type Itney.
Speaker 2: Free you from that. Let's jump into the dissection. So listen,
Speaker 2: this is a very broad subject. There's a lot that
Speaker 2: we want to unpack here.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I mean, we can't fit everything that has
Speaker 1: to do with the language into this episode, but there's
Speaker 1: a lot of things that we're going to hit and
Speaker 1: we have the perfect person to take us through it all.
Speaker 3: My name is Bob Wiley, and I'm an assistant professor
Speaker 3: in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensborough.
Speaker 2: Doctor Wylie's area of focus is on written language and
Speaker 2: specifically how learning affects perception and how cognitive psychology can
Speaker 2: be used to improve learning outcomes. And when you study
Speaker 2: letters for a living, doctor Wyllie says, you start to
Speaker 2: see them everywhere.
Speaker 3: Oh it's bad. I see them in places that they're not,
Speaker 3: you know, Like I'm looking at your door behind you
Speaker 3: right now, and I see l's and t's in there
Speaker 3: right I see letters all the time.
Speaker 1: And he's not making this up. We started by asking
Speaker 1: doctor Wylie where letters actually come from and he says,
Speaker 1: they're all around us.
Speaker 3: There's a fascinating theory about so why do our letters
Speaker 3: look the way they do? And so people have looked
Speaker 3: at all the different written languages across the world and
Speaker 3: across history, and so what they found is that there
Speaker 3: are certain shapes like an L, a T, and X
Speaker 3: those are different that seem to come up across the
Speaker 3: world's languages. And what they found is that the prevalence
Speaker 3: how common those are seems to match with how commonly
Speaker 3: we see those types of intersections in nature.
Speaker 2: If you think about the way a tree trunk meets
Speaker 2: the ground, that's a vertical line hitting a horizontal line
Speaker 2: that forms a T like intersection. So what doctor Wily
Speaker 2: is saying is that the intersections that actually occur in
Speaker 2: nature more often seem to be the ones that we
Speaker 2: see more often in our written language as well.
Speaker 1: I'm looking at my window right now, and based on that,
Speaker 1: I do see a lot of x's, a lot of t's,
Speaker 1: and a lot of l's. Like I'm looking at this
Speaker 1: brick house next door, and I see l's, I see t's.
Speaker 1: When I look in the window, I see well, not
Speaker 1: in the window at the window, I'm not looking.
Speaker 2: Into the way. I don't know. You probably got tom.
Speaker 2: You gotta keep folks. I see l's and t's. That's
Speaker 2: so crazy. There's a lot of A frame houses. How
Speaker 2: come we don't have p framed houses? And you frame
Speaker 2: you want to live in a U house?
Speaker 1: No, no, you. My friend would complain.
Speaker 2: She would not like, and you're complaining.
Speaker 1: Now you're complaining clothes.
Speaker 2: Aside from the intersections that we commonly see in nature,
Speaker 2: early adaptations of letters were also derived from pictures or
Speaker 2: symbols of the objects they represent.
Speaker 3: So when you go back and you look at the
Speaker 3: earliest forms of languages, they were pictographic. So they started.
Speaker 3: What people would do is they would draw a shape,
Speaker 3: you know, so to write the word son, you draw
Speaker 3: a shape of the sun.
Speaker 1: So from there people were like, okay, I have this
Speaker 1: symbol which means son. And the first sound of the
Speaker 1: word son is the S sound, so sun. So from
Speaker 1: there they were like, okay, I can use this symbol
Speaker 1: just to represent the S sound.
Speaker 2: Doctor Wilie gave us another example of how the letter
Speaker 2: A came about.
Speaker 3: Out A was alip, which was the word for ox.
Speaker 3: And you can still kind of see it if you
Speaker 3: turn an a upside down and it looks like an
Speaker 3: ox or like a cow with its horns. So that's
Speaker 3: where that came from.
Speaker 1: And doctor Wiley says that this is true for a
Speaker 1: lot of letters, that they all started from pictographic representation
Speaker 1: of an object and then over time it slowly became
Speaker 1: what we know as our alphabet today.
Speaker 3: Writing is slow drawing pictures. I mean, can you imagine
Speaker 3: if we had to draw our emojis? It would take
Speaker 3: so long. And so as languages developed and in order
Speaker 3: to be faster, they changed their shapes. They became simplified.
Speaker 2: He also brought up another good point that affects the
Speaker 2: way we have our written alphabet now, and that's the
Speaker 2: tools that were available.
Speaker 3: So if you look at a culture where they were
Speaker 3: using a stylus in clay, that led to different types
Speaker 3: of shapes than if you were using a brush and ink.
Speaker 3: If you're putting a chisel and stone. That's because you
Speaker 3: can manipulate those things differently. It's easier or harder to
Speaker 3: make different shapes. And so that actually ended up influencing
Speaker 3: what our letters look like.
Speaker 1: Imagine trying to write the letter S with a chisel
Speaker 1: and stone.
Speaker 2: It's not happening.
Speaker 1: That's gonna be way too hard. That's a lot of
Speaker 1: chipping that you got to do. But the letter X,
Speaker 1: that's very easy.
Speaker 2: It's crazy to think that those things determine the letters
Speaker 2: that we ended up learning in kindergarten or whenever we
Speaker 2: learned them. Do you remember, you.
Speaker 1: Know, sometimes I have little memories of when I could
Speaker 1: not read, and I was trying to figure out how
Speaker 1: to read because I knew kind of like what certain
Speaker 1: letters sounded like. But then you know, you get to
Speaker 1: certain words and that letter doesn't sound like that, a
Speaker 1: C sounds like an S, and being very confused.
Speaker 3: I mean, I don't have to tell you right. English
Speaker 3: is a mess, right, Even C isn't always cut right.
Speaker 3: Sometimes it's like circle. I don't say. Actually, when I
Speaker 3: was a kid, I used to say kirkle because to me,
Speaker 3: I was like C camp be both uh and cu.
Speaker 3: So either it's a circle, but it can't you know,
Speaker 3: you can't mix them. But it took me a while
Speaker 3: to figure that out. That's a that's a problem English has.
Speaker 2: The only thing I remember from the actual learning part
Speaker 2: of reading and writing was trying to figure out what
Speaker 2: my parents were spelling to each other. I know they
Speaker 2: were spelling it, so I wouldn't know exactly that. I
Speaker 2: was like, what is that?
Speaker 1: No secrets kept from my friend Zakia. So she's like,
Speaker 1: I've got to learn how to read quick quickly. I
Speaker 1: think all of our parents did that when they didn't
Speaker 1: want to want us to know what was going on.
Speaker 2: You know, when we take all of that into account,
Speaker 2: it's really crazy to think that your ease of or
Speaker 2: your mastery of the written language depends on things that
Speaker 2: happened so long ago, like when you were three, four
Speaker 2: and five. Doctor Wilie really helped us hone in the
Speaker 2: importance of those early years.
Speaker 3: Something we have to keep in mind about written language,
Speaker 3: like one of the biggest things that makes it different
Speaker 3: from spoken languages you have to learn it. So you know,
Speaker 3: you probably know that a child will learn any language
Speaker 3: you know, verbal that it grows up around effortlessly. No
Speaker 3: one has to teach them. You just learn your language.
Speaker 3: And that's not the case with written language. You have
Speaker 3: to be instructed to learn it.
Speaker 2: That's such a good point, right, It's not inherent the
Speaker 2: ability to write and read. Somebody has to teach it,
Speaker 2: and so much of your ability to do this rest
Speaker 2: on the access to quality education at a young age.
Speaker 1: And throughout history there have been people who have been
Speaker 1: denied that access. And it is only in very recent
Speaker 1: history that people have been allowed to learn how to
Speaker 1: read and write.
Speaker 3: Up until not that long ago, very very few people
Speaker 3: could read and write, you know, so you think that, oh,
Speaker 3: but they had written language in ancient Egypt, and you're like, sure,
Speaker 3: for twenty people who are like recording things in the court, right, Like,
Speaker 3: no one, hardly anyone knew how to do this.
Speaker 1: This wasn't granted at the same time to all.
Speaker 2: People, and it's not at the same level, even though
Speaker 2: it's granted now, definitely not at the same level. In fact,
Speaker 2: a lot of schools now are de emphasizing the importance
Speaker 2: of learning handwriting since so many of us are using
Speaker 2: phones and computers to write keyboards.
Speaker 3: Basically, cursive has mostly gone from schools, and even just
Speaker 3: the time given to handwriting it's really decreased because it's
Speaker 3: not part of them, right, it's not technically science, technology,
Speaker 3: education or math. But you know what some of us
Speaker 3: always point is, you don't do any of those things
Speaker 3: without reading and writing. Like, please try to do a
Speaker 3: science project without reading something. Please try to do that,
Speaker 3: it's not going to happen. And I think there are
Speaker 3: getting seminis that there are costs to this shift away
Speaker 3: from the actual handwriting.
Speaker 2: Aspect, and it's not just about needing to write in
Speaker 2: order to study other subjects. Writing by hand also helps
Speaker 2: us actually learn better.
Speaker 3: You can, for example, take people who either children who
Speaker 3: are still just learning language or adults learning in new alphabets,
Speaker 3: so as they're learning the letters, they actually learned to
Speaker 3: write them by hand. There's all kinds of benefits. So
Speaker 3: in terms of behavior, they are going to memorize those
Speaker 3: letters more quickly, they're going to retain them for longer
Speaker 3: compared to if you just study them visually or if
Speaker 3: you learn them by typing as well.
Speaker 1: And this rings true for me specifically, because that is
Speaker 1: the way that I learned pretty much all things. And
Speaker 1: it started in high school for me when I realized, oh,
Speaker 1: my goodness, I think I've cracked the code on how
Speaker 1: to really memorize or learn some things. Because I was
Speaker 1: awful in biology, just awful. It was really really hard
Speaker 1: for me to remember all of these things. So what
Speaker 1: I started doing was this. If my teacher said, oh,
Speaker 1: we're going to be having a quiz on chapter three.
Speaker 1: I would read chapter three and then I would write
Speaker 1: the entire chapter. So I would look at each word
Speaker 1: and write them down in a separate notebook. And when
Speaker 1: I did that, I felt like everything was like being reinforced.
Speaker 1: It was like pouring concrete over all that information. And
Speaker 1: so writing in my own handwriting definitely has a strong
Speaker 1: link to learning for me.
Speaker 2: For me, it's also reading handwriting that makes a difference
Speaker 2: for me if I have notes and I go back
Speaker 2: and I can remember things like I can see, oh,
Speaker 2: I wrote this. There has also been some evidence about
Speaker 2: the tie in for other people reading handwriting. It's also
Speaker 2: a teaching strategy where folks are adding handwriting to type
Speaker 2: texts to help you retain information.
Speaker 3: So what do we know about why that might be. Well,
Speaker 3: here's a few things we know about that. When we
Speaker 3: look at things like letters, we don't just look at
Speaker 3: the pattern in terms of a static image. We also
Speaker 3: automatically think about how was that created? And this is
Speaker 3: especially true when we're reading handwriting as opposed to print.
Speaker 3: And that's why when people are reading, we see all
Speaker 3: kinds of activity in the motor part of the brain,
Speaker 3: there's a lot of activity in the part of the
Speaker 3: brain that you use for writing. Even when you're not writing,
Speaker 3: you can just be laying there board as hell looking
Speaker 3: at words, and that part of your brain that thinks
Speaker 3: about how would I write that, it's very, very active,
Speaker 3: and so that seems to be part of why it's
Speaker 3: so important to have that handwriting experience because we actually
Speaker 3: use that not just for writing, we also use that
Speaker 3: for reading.
Speaker 1: So we've learned a lot about writing from a historical perspective,
Speaker 1: but also psychological and sociological. We're going to take a
Speaker 1: quick break and when we get back, we're going to
Speaker 1: talk all about the biological aspects of writing and reading.
Speaker 1: What's actually happening in our brains. And we're back, let's
Speaker 1: actually talk about the brain and what's happening when we
Speaker 1: see letters.
Speaker 2: So the first stage is a stimulus. This is just
Speaker 2: seeing letters on the page.
Speaker 3: When we look at say just a single word, right
Speaker 3: like cat when you are a fluent reader. All right,
Speaker 3: so let's just talk about adults. It's a separate thing.
Speaker 3: You know, with children who are in they're first learning,
Speaker 3: but once you're adult and you know how to read,
Speaker 3: all that process it's automatized to the point that you
Speaker 3: cannot help but recognize that word. And that's because the
Speaker 3: average adult has read billions of letters. By the time
Speaker 3: they're say forty or fifty, you've seen billions of letters.
Speaker 3: And so one of the things that's so crazy about
Speaker 3: that is there aren't that many things like you know,
Speaker 3: that many objects that we get that much exposure to.
Speaker 2: This relates back to what doctor Wiley was saying earlier
Speaker 2: about the origins of letters. We see them everywhere, not
Speaker 2: just in nature, but in our day to day lives.
Speaker 2: We're just exposed to letters all the time.
Speaker 3: What we do really quickly when we're reading is we
Speaker 3: actually abstract from what we're seeing. Whether I write kat
Speaker 3: by hand, or I see it typed in you know,
Speaker 3: capital letters, or I see it in lowercase letters, we
Speaker 3: really quickly abstract away that information at some level is
Speaker 3: sort of discarded by the brain.
Speaker 2: Your brain takes what it needs and it discards everything else.
Speaker 2: It doesn't care about the font, if it's handwritten or tight,
Speaker 2: the color, none of that matters. It just goes straight
Speaker 2: to processing.
Speaker 1: So once you've taken in c at there's actually two
Speaker 1: routes that the brain can take to process that information.
Speaker 3: So the first route we call the phonological route.
Speaker 2: Phonological is sounding it out. You're using your memory, but
Speaker 2: you're trying to remember the sounds of each letter. So
Speaker 2: C is A T to cat cat.
Speaker 3: And then we go into our long term memory, and
Speaker 3: that long term memory is for the sounds of words.
Speaker 3: So then we're searching. We're saying, okay, have I heard
Speaker 3: that sound cat? And then you say, oh yeah, I
Speaker 3: have that story in my long term memory. And then
Speaker 3: I say, oh yeah, cat, it's an animal, it's feeling,
Speaker 3: it's a pet. And that's how we identify the word
Speaker 3: through a phonological route. But we have another route, and
Speaker 3: it's an orthographic route.
Speaker 2: Orthographic is when I see these string of letters, I
Speaker 2: remember they mean a thing. So it's the string of
Speaker 2: letters and remembering the meaning. No sound is associated with this.
Speaker 2: You're skipping the sound all together.
Speaker 3: What it does. It says I have this abstract representation
Speaker 3: that the letters are C, A, and T, and then
Speaker 3: we go into our long term memory, not for the sound,
Speaker 3: but just have I seen this string of letters in
Speaker 3: this order? And then I say, oh yes, When I
Speaker 3: see that string of letters, it means a fee line,
Speaker 3: a small animal, a pet, all of that. So what
Speaker 3: we do is we always do that when we see
Speaker 3: any word, we try in both ways to figure out
Speaker 3: that word. We try to sound it out basically, and
Speaker 3: we just try to find a memory for that string.
Speaker 1: So it's like you see the letters c at and
Speaker 1: then they shoot off the gun, and it's like whoever
Speaker 1: gets there first is the winner. Even as an adult,
Speaker 1: when you get to a word that you don't know.
Speaker 2: That's so funny. I don't feel the orthological as much.
Speaker 2: I do recognize when I shift back to phonological absolutely,
Speaker 2: And sometimes there's a little trick where I do a
Speaker 2: blend of both. You know, when we see a new
Speaker 2: word in science or medicine and probably engineering too, we
Speaker 2: have some tricks from root words that we've learned Latin
Speaker 2: or Greek that help us kind of make sense of
Speaker 2: what a word might mean. And those things aren't related
Speaker 2: to sound. It is when I see this string of letters,
Speaker 2: like even phonological pho in, I know that is sound
Speaker 2: right or ortho oh r thho, I know that is
Speaker 2: correct or straight right. And immediately when I brought up orthological,
Speaker 2: you said orthodontis orthopedic, these brains are amazing bruh, honestly,
Speaker 2: Or do you remember that meme where they say Cambridge
Speaker 2: University scientists have figured out even when letters are jumbled
Speaker 2: in between, as long as you can see the first
Speaker 2: letter in the last letter, you can understand this passage.
Speaker 2: Do you remember that? Yes?
Speaker 1: I remember it, and I remember being like, oh my gosh,
Speaker 1: look how advanced my brain is. I don't even need
Speaker 1: these letters to be in order. Your girls smart and
Speaker 1: doctor Wiley definitely just made me feel.
Speaker 2: Duped.
Speaker 3: What happened in that thing is that they were really
Speaker 3: careful about how they jumbled the words. So there are
Speaker 3: some words where it's true that if you switch around
Speaker 3: the letters you still know what that is. So say,
Speaker 3: we're like judge j u dge. If you see ju
Speaker 3: gde right, if it looks like jug d you know
Speaker 3: that that's judge, because there's nothing else that looks like that.
Speaker 3: So they're careful that they only use words like that.
Speaker 3: And I think we're like calm. If you switch the
Speaker 3: A and the L and calm, you get clam and
Speaker 3: now it's a different word. So we actually can't just
Speaker 3: jumble letters around.
Speaker 1: Yeah, So in that fake study that they put out.
Speaker 1: They were very intentional about the words that they chose,
Speaker 1: and they had us all out here thinking that our
Speaker 1: brains worked a certain way that they don't.
Speaker 2: Doctor Wylie tells us, we're not really good at knowing
Speaker 2: exactly the order of letters when we're looking at them.
Speaker 2: So there's a question of what we actually know when
Speaker 2: we figure out what a word is, and when you
Speaker 2: feel like you know it, what concrete things do you
Speaker 2: know about it? And I think that's what scientists are
Speaker 2: still trying to figure out.
Speaker 1: So when we see a word and that gun goes
Speaker 1: off in our brain, and our brain starts shooting off
Speaker 1: phonological and orthological, those two routes, and whoever wins wins.
Speaker 1: But where are they racing too?
Speaker 3: So there's this part of the brain that's called it's
Speaker 3: called several things, so it's been called the brain's letterbox
Speaker 3: or the visual word form area. It's typically in the
Speaker 3: left hemisphere and a part of the temporal lobe called
Speaker 3: the fusiform gyros.
Speaker 2: And you have to remember that the brain is split
Speaker 2: into two hemispheres, kind of left and right, and the
Speaker 2: fusiform gyros is on both.
Speaker 3: So the fusiform gyros in the right hemisphere, so the
Speaker 3: homologous part, the same part across the hemisphere is specialized
Speaker 3: for face processing. It's so it's called the fusiform face
Speaker 3: area in the right hemisphere, and then we have the
Speaker 3: visual word form area and the left hemisphere.
Speaker 2: And we see that the brain changes as children begin
Speaker 2: to learn to read.
Speaker 3: When you're first showing them letters, it's very bilateral, so
Speaker 3: you'll see particular amounts of activity in both the left
Speaker 3: and the right hemispheres when they're looking at words before
Speaker 3: they can really read them. And then as we become
Speaker 3: more expert in reading and writing, that activity shifts further
Speaker 3: to the left. It lateralizes.
Speaker 2: We're using that fusiform gyvis in the left hemisphere to
Speaker 2: recall those words for reading and writing.
Speaker 1: So this sounds like to me that reading is strongly
Speaker 1: tied to memory.
Speaker 2: Yes, memory plays a big role in reading and writing.
Speaker 2: And there's quite a bit happening when we think about
Speaker 2: that race that is basically an obstacle course.
Speaker 1: Honestly, and for some people that obstacle course is instead
Speaker 1: of it just being you know, a little puddle that
Speaker 1: you got to jump over, it's a brick wall that
Speaker 1: you gotta climb.
Speaker 2: Doctor Wilie takes us through two examples, dyslexia and dysgraphia.
Speaker 3: So dyslexia is about reading. Dysgraphia is about the spelling,
Speaker 3: and that can happen developmentally, of course, and we know
Speaker 3: many children have those issues.
Speaker 1: But you can also acquire dyslexia and dysgraphia through traumatic
Speaker 1: brain injury or stroke, and when this happens it's called
Speaker 1: a phasia.
Speaker 2: Dyslexia is about reading, So a person with dyslexia has
Speaker 2: difficulty associating sounds or different speech sounds within a word,
Speaker 2: in learning how the letters represent the sound. So this
Speaker 2: is more phonological.
Speaker 1: So when we think about that that race, when that
Speaker 1: gun goes off their phonological route, there could be some
Speaker 1: obstacles in the way that causes that portion of the
Speaker 1: race to go slower.
Speaker 2: And dysgraphia is more about writing and.
Speaker 3: Spe There's one really cool study that worked with dysgraphic
Speaker 3: patients and what they found is there's patterns of behavior
Speaker 3: when things go wrong. So for example, some individuals their deficit,
Speaker 3: the longer the word is, the more likely they are
Speaker 3: to make an error. And what we know from then
Speaker 3: is that this is a what we call orthographic working
Speaker 3: memory problem. So when you go to spell a word,
Speaker 3: when you go to write a word, you have to
Speaker 3: hold on to those letters in memory. But what can
Speaker 3: happen if you have dysgraphia is that that can really
Speaker 3: break down during this process of reading or during this
Speaker 3: process of trying to spell something, they lose track and
Speaker 3: so they get funny errors, because what might happen is
Speaker 3: they might delete letters, like suddenly it's supposed to be
Speaker 3: eight letters, and then they write down five of them.
Speaker 3: But they may also insert them, and those letters may
Speaker 3: come from things like we call perseverations, so it may
Speaker 3: be the previous word they spelled it's sort of still
Speaker 3: active in their memory. So you can have these deficits
Speaker 3: that are showing you that in this sort of temporary
Speaker 3: storage that can go wrong.
Speaker 2: Sometimes it's a problem of losing your place remembering what
Speaker 2: you've already said versus what comes next. Sometimes it's a
Speaker 2: case of not being able to clear your memory.
Speaker 3: And that's in a different part of the brain than
Speaker 3: the long term storage. So you find other people where
Speaker 3: it doesn't matter whether the words three letters or ten letters.
Speaker 3: That has nothing to do with their deficits. It's all
Speaker 3: about the frequency. What do those people do? And this
Speaker 3: also happens with dyslexia. You're going to rely on that
Speaker 3: phonological route. So if you have a problem with your
Speaker 3: long term memory, you have a hard time just holding
Speaker 3: on to those strings of letters and what you need,
Speaker 3: you're going to rely on that process of sounding words out.
Speaker 2: And we know nothing is as it seems in the
Speaker 2: English language. We got to be easier on ourselves. You know,
Speaker 2: if we're all out here trying to spill it right,
Speaker 2: get it right, put the punctuation in the right order,
Speaker 2: make sure we say the word right, we retrieve the
Speaker 2: right word. This is almost like a false construct we're
Speaker 2: putting on our minds. We didn't evolve a capacity for this,
Speaker 2: like we're enforcing this. This is why you have to teach.
Speaker 2: It is not innate speaking learning the spoken language that
Speaker 2: happens automatically. You just need to be immersed in spoken
Speaker 2: language written language. Laying amongst pages of text does not
Speaker 2: help you learn to read.
Speaker 1: Can't lay your head on these books and get these words.
Speaker 2: Don't work like that. And so when we really think
Speaker 2: about it, we're forcing our brains to do something that
Speaker 2: is not designed to do. And that's kind of cool,
Speaker 2: but it's also meaning that we got to give these
Speaker 2: brains some room to make some mistakes.
Speaker 3: One of the things that's so cool to think about
Speaker 3: with the written language is we know that evolutionarily, right,
Speaker 3: there's not been time for this to evolved. And one
Speaker 3: of the questions that makes us try to understand is
Speaker 3: how are we able to do something that we know
Speaker 3: we didn't evolve any capacity to do? So we have
Speaker 3: to be using some part of the brain that will
Speaker 3: let us read and write that didn't evolve to do that,
Speaker 3: And so people wonder, well, what does that part of
Speaker 3: the brain do if you don't know how to read
Speaker 3: and write? What would it be doing otherwise? And is
Speaker 3: there something it can no longer do now that you're
Speaker 3: using it for reading and writing? So those, I think
Speaker 3: are really fascinating questions that are very difficult to answer,
Speaker 3: but really important ones.
Speaker 1: Evolutionarily, reading is not critical to survival, and the only
Speaker 1: times that we have evolved as a species is in
Speaker 1: order to survive. So what it takes for us to
Speaker 1: be able to live.
Speaker 2: And not just to live, but to live long enough
Speaker 2: to reproduce?
Speaker 1: Ah okay, because I mean it's true there are people
Speaker 1: who don't know how to read and write and they're
Speaker 1: still able to function in society. We haven't gotten to
Speaker 1: that point evolutionarily where it is absolutely necessary, so then
Speaker 1: we would eventually change our brains to need that ability.
Speaker 2: Compare reading and writing to speaking. So if you think
Speaker 2: about it, we have communication centers in the brain because
Speaker 2: you have to be able to communicate if you're going
Speaker 2: to get to a stage where you're reproducing with another human, right, right,
Speaker 2: and so that can be sign language, that can be
Speaker 2: multiple ways of communication. But we have evolved the communication
Speaker 2: center because it's been necessary for our survival. Even when
Speaker 2: we think about gathering and living in groups, which we
Speaker 2: know early on in the evolutionary process humans began to do.
Speaker 1: But that's not true for reading and writing.
Speaker 2: You can still communicate even if you can't read and write.
Speaker 2: There's no selective pressure on reading and writing.
Speaker 1: Also, the ability to write does not put you at
Speaker 1: a evolutionary advantage. No, not yet, not yet. And I
Speaker 1: feel like my handwriting, but I do feel like my
Speaker 1: handwriting does put me at a social disadvantage currently, and
Speaker 1: so I want to know if there is anything that
Speaker 1: people when they see my handwriting if there's anything that
Speaker 1: people can assume about me, because I think no. But
Speaker 1: we ask doctor Wiley if there was any information that
Speaker 1: you could discern from someone's handwriting.
Speaker 3: It definitely tells you something. So here's one thing what
Speaker 3: I know about that, and like how people vary. So
Speaker 3: one thing we if there's some research on, is the
Speaker 3: fact that so people will typically tend to write letters
Speaker 3: more or less the same, but there is a lot
Speaker 3: of variability there and some of it is what we
Speaker 3: call individual differences, and some of it is more cultural.
Speaker 3: So for example, exit and other parts of the world,
Speaker 3: like in Britain, So you probably do one of the
Speaker 3: diagonal lines and then you probably cross it. Right, would
Speaker 3: you believe that there are people who do it as
Speaker 3: like a greater than sign and then a less than
Speaker 3: sign because there are.
Speaker 2: No no news. Yes, how are you going to make
Speaker 2: sure those things touch just at the right place? That's crazy.
Speaker 1: I was glad to hear that. Doctor Wilie said that
Speaker 1: really the only thing that you can really take away
Speaker 1: from somebody's handwriting might be just where they grew up,
Speaker 1: Like it's just a geographic thing. Like in this area
Speaker 1: of the world, folks write certain letters. This way, and
Speaker 1: there's really nothing else you can you can get from that.
Speaker 1: You can't assume anything about their personality, So that that
Speaker 1: kind of makes me feel a little bit better about
Speaker 1: my thick letters.
Speaker 2: Does this mean you'll share your handwriting with all of
Speaker 2: our listeners?
Speaker 1: Oh, man, I see out of feeling you were gonna
Speaker 1: do this, I will do it. If Zakiya does it.
Speaker 1: If you put up your handwriting, I will also put
Speaker 1: up mine.
Speaker 2: I'm gang.
Speaker 1: We'll post on our Instagram our writing samples, yes, and
Speaker 1: our comments will be.
Speaker 2: Closed to shade. Okay, you know, I feel like there
Speaker 2: are a thousand questions we could ask, and doctor Wilie
Speaker 2: really got us together so we could understand just how
Speaker 2: complex written language is. There's honestly no limit to where
Speaker 2: written language has influence. And that's what I learned from
Speaker 2: doctor Willie answering all of our questions, is that it's
Speaker 2: way deeper than what we think is deeper than rep
Speaker 2: I remember our first question to him was like, what
Speaker 2: can you tell us about written language? Here's what he said.
Speaker 3: There's a lot going on, so there's a there's a
Speaker 3: lot to unpack. And one of the things that I
Speaker 3: always have to think about when you know, when people
Speaker 3: want to talk about things like this is you have
Speaker 3: to think kind of about the like the level of
Speaker 3: analysis that you're interested in, you know, even if you
Speaker 3: just want to talk about the brain. So what are
Speaker 3: the neurals substrates that support reading and writing? It really
Speaker 3: depends like, well, what do you mean when you mean writing?
Speaker 3: Do you mean the actual process of using your hand,
Speaker 3: you know, to produce letters on a page, or do
Speaker 3: you mean spelling, which for psychologists we usually actually mean spelling. Right,
Speaker 3: So spelling traditionally, you know, you do that by writing
Speaker 3: by hand, but now most of us are doing it
Speaker 3: by typing. And we also have oral spelling, right, which
Speaker 3: we still do when someone says, how do you spell
Speaker 3: your name? I have to do this all the time, right,
Speaker 3: I say W I L E Y. So those are
Speaker 3: we talked about the modality of these things, and what's
Speaker 3: so cool about written language is that it actually has
Speaker 3: representations in all these different modalities.
Speaker 2: That's it for Lab thirty, but we have so much
Speaker 2: more for you to dig into on our website. Go
Speaker 2: to Dope Labs podcasts.
Speaker 1: On our website, you can find a cheat sheet for
Speaker 1: today's episode, along with a ton of other links and
Speaker 1: resources in our show notes, and.
Speaker 2: If you want to stay in the know with Dope Labs,
Speaker 2: don't forget to sign up for our newsletter too. Here
Speaker 2: basically will become our virtual pimpal.
Speaker 1: Special Thanks to our guest expert, doctor Robert Wiley, visit
Speaker 1: his blog at writing Brain dot blog. You can find
Speaker 1: out more about his work in our show notes.
Speaker 2: Also, we love hearing from you. What did you think
Speaker 2: about today's lab? What are your ideas for future labs?
Speaker 2: Our number is two zero two five six seven seven
Speaker 2: zero two eight. You can find us on Twitter and
Speaker 2: Instagram at Dope Labs podcast.
Speaker 1: Tt is on Twitter at d r Underscore t Sho,
Speaker 1: and you can find Zakia at z said So.
Speaker 2: Follow us on Spotify or wherever else you listen to
Speaker 2: your podcast.
Speaker 1: Dope Labs is produced by Jenny Rattle at Mask of
Speaker 1: Wave Runner Studios.
Speaker 2: Mixing sound design by Hannis Brown.
Speaker 1: Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura composed our theme music, with
Speaker 1: addition music by Elijah Lex Harvey.
Speaker 2: Dope Labs is a production of Spotify and Mega Owned
Speaker 2: Media Group, and it's executive produced by us T T
Speaker 2: show Dia and Zakiah Wattley, you know something that I
Speaker 2: realized I haven't used in a while, But you know
Speaker 2: I Message has that feature where when you turn the
Speaker 2: phone to the side, you can actually write with your finger.
Speaker 3: Yes.
Speaker 1: Well, the thing is is that it never knows what
Speaker 1: I'm writing, So I guess these letters just too voluptuous.