Dehaene's Argumentative Analysis

To answer this question one must remove the idea of limitation of neuronal recycling and think of this idea terms of evolution. It is a process and although there is no real answer, the hypothesis proposed by Dehaene is stepping stone into reaching our target. This is best exemplified when compared to “the minute bones, deep in the ear, that seem so perfectly designed to amplify incoming sounds… Darwinian evolution whittled them out of the jawbones of ancient reptiles” (Dehaene) as through evolution, instead of fully disregarding a less useful feat, it is in fact transformed or even tinkered into something else.

An argument which this fully goes against is the tabula rasa or “blank slate” as Dehaene argues that “our cortex” (Dehaene) can’t be simplified into and which “faithfully records any cultural invention” (Dehaene), and instead compares it to a “Lego construction set” (Dehaene). Using this terminology, what Dehaene is proposing is the fact that cultural activity make use of areas in the brain that have evolved previously for tasks of similar nature, especially in our case when it comes to reading. As we know “reading, for instance, was invented only 5400 years ago, and symbolic arithmetic is even more recent” (Antonio M. Battro) and what

According to Dehaene “cultural artefacts can deviate considerably from the natural world in which we have evolved” (Dehaene) and therefore “each of them must find its “ecological niche” in the brain, or a neuronal circuit whose initial function is close enough and whole flexibility is sufficient to be converted to this new role” (Dehaene). These niches can be things or objects that we find in nature and perhaps outgrown their usefulness in our lives e.g. animal tracks due to natural selection. Which are then converted to perhaps us learning to read. Furthermore Dehaene states that “cultural learning never totally undoes these pre-existing biases – it merely works around them”