Agency in Reading VS Gaming

Comparing computer play with reading fiction reveals much about thes^se shortcomings. Reading stimulates the mental recreation of settingg, characterers, a and acactiojons in viLxal, auditory, tactile, kinesthetic, and other sensory images. One "sees" the pirate h the scar slashing across his cheek. One "hears" the sail flapping in the wind. One "feels" the swell of the waves on ship deck. Perhaps one also "smells" the salt air. nd so on. The reader pulls all these sensory images together i...

 Blending and Segmenting Sounds to Instill Phoneme Awareness

One activity is segmenting sounds and then blending them together using both real words and nonsense words. This activity gives students practice manipulating phenomes and is consistent with the research supporting stimulation of both posterior processing systems (McCandliss, Cohen, & Dehaene, 2003). Another activity is oral blending and segmenting paired with letters. This process may help students practice the alphabetic principle (the establishment of a correspondence between a phonem...

 The Other Men

This planet, being essentially of the terrestrial type, had produced a race that was essentially human, though, so to speak, human in a different key from the terrestrial. These continents were as variegated as ours, and inhabited by a race as diversified as Homo sapiens. All the modes and facets of the spirit manifested in our history had their equivalents in the history of the Other Men. As with us, there had been dark ages and ages of brilliance, phases of advancement and of retreat, cultu...

 Religion on Other Earth

Perhaps the most striking example of the extravagance of the Other Men was the part played by religion in their more advanced societies. Religion was a much greater power than on my own planet; and the religious teachings of the prophets of old were able to kindle even my alien and sluggish heart with fervor. Yet religion, as it occurred around me in contemporary society, was far from edifying. I must begin by explaining that in the development of religion on the Other Earth gustatory sensat...

 The Mind Needs Stimulation

A human totally deprived of bodily senses does not do well. After 12 hours in a sensory deprivation tank (where one floats in a body-temperature saline solution that produces almost no skin sensation, in total darkness and silence, with taste and smell and the sensations of breathing minimized) a subject will begin to hallucinate, as the mind, somewhat like a television tuned to a nonexistent channel, turns up the amplification, desperately looking for a signal, becoming ever less discriminat...

 Multisensory Integration

In sensory perception, multisensory integration is the rule, not the exception. In audition, we don’t just hear with our ears, we use our eyes to locate the apparent sources of sounds in the cinema where we “hear” the voices coming from the actors’ mouths on the screen, although the sounds are coming from the sides of the theater. This is known as the ventriloquism effect. Similarly, retronasal odors detected by olfactory receptors in the nose are experienced as tastes in the mouth. T...