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What do you lose? Other skills. Puts a whole new light on the idea of the 'absent minded professor.'
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Bad memory for faces? Blame your reading skills
Have you ever been embarrassed by introducing yourself at a party to someone only for them to point out that you've met before? Don't feel too bad: your superior reading skills may be to blame, according to a new brain-scan study.
Stanislas Dehaene at the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, has previously proposed a "neuronal recycling" theory, which suggests that new skills are handled by existing brain-cell circuits with older but related functions.
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"The intriguing possibility that our face-perception abilities suffer in proportion to our reading skills will be explored in future research," they say.
Dehaene has previously speculated that the ability to read may have hijacked a neuronal network that evolved to enable us to visually track animals.
Last year, Manuel Carreiras at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastián, Spain, found that the brains of adults who learned to read as adults were structurally different to those who could not read.
Carreiras describes Dehaene's findings as "remarkable". "The hypothesis suggests that this brain area has not evolved for reading but results from a reconfiguration of evolutionarily older brain circuits dedicated to object processing," he says.
Have you ever been embarrassed by introducing yourself at a party to someone only for them to point out that you've met before? Don't feel too bad: your superior reading skills may be to blame, according to a new brain-scan study.
Stanislas Dehaene at the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, has previously proposed a "neuronal recycling" theory, which suggests that new skills are handled by existing brain-cell circuits with older but related functions.
>
"The intriguing possibility that our face-perception abilities suffer in proportion to our reading skills will be explored in future research," they say.
Dehaene has previously speculated that the ability to read may have hijacked a neuronal network that evolved to enable us to visually track animals.
Last year, Manuel Carreiras at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastián, Spain, found that the brains of adults who learned to read as adults were structurally different to those who could not read.
Carreiras describes Dehaene's findings as "remarkable". "The hypothesis suggests that this brain area has not evolved for reading but results from a reconfiguration of evolutionarily older brain circuits dedicated to object processing," he says.
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