culture

I'm heading to Tokyo in a few weeks for a pan-Asian Digital Youth culture and thinking a lot about the "youth" part of that topic.

When I lectutred last week in Italy on digital youth, someone asked me how I made the connection between digitality and neuroscience. That's an easy question and an extremely difficult one and the path from one to the other is: learning.

A recent study of dyslexia, and how it affects different parts of the brains of children reading in English or Chinese, is gaining a lot of attention and being posed as another example of the "neurbiological clues" of dyslexia. But studies of differential dyslexic rates and definitions have gone on for decades. The issue isn't just neurobiological but the intertwined relationship of neurobiology, culture, history, and linguistics. Once again, brain-determinism shortchanges the complexity of the research findings.