Lab 030: Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Have you been seeing all this stuff going on with the USPS?

Yes, honey, I am disgusted.

Yeah, the USPS is so critical to everything. I don't understand, like how we can even be considering moving this money around and not giving it to them, Like how are we going to even function? I can't imagine life without the USPS.

Yes, and you know I love to send a letter. Everybody and my family worked at the post office growing up, so I am wed to the post office. I used to collect stamps as a kid. Okay, so yes, I used to collect stamps, stamps, and X Men cars. Those are the things I collected. I collected POGs, Oh, I remember those. Yes, I know what you were supposed to do with them.

I didn't know. I just had a little tupperware container full of them, just looked at them and that was it.

I think the pog came before the beanie baby, right.

I think so. And I didn't have a single beanie baby. Do y'all still have y'all beanie babies?

They're dusty if you still have them, I know that unless you are they machine washable.

Don't they got beans on the inside?

All those beans come out?

You got enough beans? To make a bean back chair. Repurpose those things you reduce, reuse, recycle. I'm t T and I'm Zachiah and from Spotify. This is dope Labs.

Everybody's talking about buying stamps and showing their books to stamps. My favorite stamp right now is the Marvin Gaye stamp. It's hard to find them. It's hard to find.

I'm just this is something I did not know about my friend, and it makes complete sense.

Actually, you haven't been paying attention to the stamps.

I send you no Okay, so zakiya. When anything big happens or anything that she feels like is significant in your life, she will send you a really really nice card with a note in it. I still have some of them where she's saying congratulations, I'm so proud of you, handwritten everything, so so nice. But I have never paid attention to the stamp.

What the stamp is always on brand, it's on themes. Okay, you need to go back. If you have those envelopes, I do not post at these for the postcards you should be able to see.

Okay, well, I don't have the envelopes, but I trust that they were on brand because the card itself was always on Brandy. I always had a black woman on the front. They're always very, very good. So let's talk about why folks have been stepping up to support the USPS.

The post Office, or the United States Postal Service, is operated by the federal government, and for many years it's been operating at a deficit. So that's like a business is running and you're not turn a profit. But the thing to remember is that most federal agencies operated as a deficit in. The post Office is the only one that doesn't get money from the government to operate, and

And then on top of all of that, we get a new Postmaster General who says that he's going to be using these cost cutting mechanisms and that would limit the reach of the USPS.

So basically, our postal service is in trouble.

One of the ways you can support the USPS is by sending more letters, and for me, that's kind of like a double his sword. I want to support the USPS, but I really hate my handwriting, so I don't want to do that. And my printer is out of ink, so typing something up is kind of like out of the question. I need to pray just more ink. And I don't want people to know what my handwriting looks like. I go to great lengths to shield everyone from my handwriting.

Everybody join me in this moment of lifting tt in that handwriting up.

Once you see it, you're gonna put it right back down.

I welcome those bubble letters.

See, I don't want to be described as someone that had that writes in bubble letters like I'm not eight, I'm not eight years old.

I'm a girl. That's the way I'm saying it. Those voluptuous strokes. What about that?

Your handwriting thick with two c's okay? So our question is about our writing because since we're going to be supporting the USPS more, it got us thinking about writing, different people's writing styles, how we learn to write, and so we just had more questions than answers, and so we thought we would dig into it.

Take it to the experts. Today's lab is about written languages, specifically alphabetic.

Languages with alphabetic languages like English, Greek, or Russian, each written symbol corresponds to an individual sound. The difference between alphabetic and non alphabetic systems is that non alphabetic languages have written symbols that correspond to larger groups of sound, like syllables or whole words like Chinese. Let's get into the recitation. What do we know? We know writing is important, yes, and we know that everybody writes differently. I think that's it.

I think I need to know more about how we actually learn to write, what's happening in our brains?

Yeah, And I want to know the history of writing, because I mean, it's definitely changed over time, I think. And so I just want to know, like how it all started and how we got to this place that we are now.

And I think the million dollar question, you know, we see it in different places. Does handwriting have much meaning? Does it say something about who you are? Right?

Because I would like to believe that the way that I write and the judgment I receive is unfounded, like no base and those two things don't there's no connection.

Whoever's judging TT you need to stop it right.

Now, it's probably mostly me judging myself, Like I'll write a sentence, I'll be like, oh girl, type Itney.

Free you from that. Let's jump into the dissection. So listen, this is a very broad subject. There's a lot that we want to unpack here.

Yes, and I mean, we can't fit everything that has to do with the language into this episode, but there's a lot of things that we're going to hit and we have the perfect person to take us through it all.

My name is Bob Wiley, and I'm an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of North Carolina, Greensborough.

Doctor Wylie's area of focus is on written language and specifically how learning affects perception and how cognitive psychology can be used to improve learning outcomes. And when you study letters for a living, doctor Wyllie says, you start to see them everywhere.

Oh it's bad. I see them in places that they're not, you know, Like I'm looking at your door behind you right now, and I see l's and t's in there right I see letters all the time.

And he's not making this up. We started by asking doctor Wylie where letters actually come from and he says, they're all around us.

There's a fascinating theory about so why do our letters look the way they do? And so people have looked at all the different written languages across the world and across history, and so what they found is that there are certain shapes like an L, a T, and X those are different that seem to come up across the world's languages. And what they found is that the prevalence how common those are seems to match with how commonly we see those types of intersections in nature.

If you think about the way a tree trunk meets the ground, that's a vertical line hitting a horizontal line that forms a T like intersection. So what doctor Wily is saying is that the intersections that actually occur in nature more often seem to be the ones that we see more often in our written language as well.

I'm looking at my window right now, and based on that, I do see a lot of x's, a lot of t's, and a lot of l's. Like I'm looking at this brick house next door, and I see l's, I see t's. When I look in the window, I see well, not in the window at the window, I'm not looking.

Into the way. I don't know. You probably got tom. You gotta keep folks. I see l's and t's. That's so crazy. There's a lot of A frame houses. How come we don't have p framed houses? And you frame you want to live in a U house?

No, no, you. My friend would complain.

She would not like, and you're complaining.

Now you're complaining clothes.

Aside from the intersections that we commonly see in nature, early adaptations of letters were also derived from pictures or symbols of the objects they represent.

So when you go back and you look at the earliest forms of languages, they were pictographic. So they started. What people would do is they would draw a shape, you know, so to write the word son, you draw a shape of the sun.

So from there people were like, okay, I have this symbol which means son. And the first sound of the word son is the S sound, so sun. So from there they were like, okay, I can use this symbol just to represent the S sound.

Doctor Wilie gave us another example of how the letter A came about.

Out A was alip, which was the word for ox. And you can still kind of see it if you turn an a upside down and it looks like an ox or like a cow with its horns. So that's where that came from.

And doctor Wiley says that this is true for a lot of letters, that they all started from pictographic representation of an object and then over time it slowly became what we know as our alphabet today.

Writing is slow drawing pictures. I mean, can you imagine if we had to draw our emojis? It would take so long. And so as languages developed and in order to be faster, they changed their shapes. They became simplified.

He also brought up another good point that affects the way we have our written alphabet now, and that's the tools that were available.

So if you look at a culture where they were using a stylus in clay, that led to different types of shapes than if you were using a brush and ink. If you're putting a chisel and stone. That's because you can manipulate those things differently. It's easier or harder to make different shapes. And so that actually ended up influencing what our letters look like.

Imagine trying to write the letter S with a chisel and stone.

It's not happening.

That's gonna be way too hard. That's a lot of chipping that you got to do. But the letter X, that's very easy.

It's crazy to think that those things determine the letters that we ended up learning in kindergarten or whenever we learned them. Do you remember, you.

Know, sometimes I have little memories of when I could not read, and I was trying to figure out how to read because I knew kind of like what certain letters sounded like. But then you know, you get to certain words and that letter doesn't sound like that, a C sounds like an S, and being very confused.

I mean, I don't have to tell you right. English is a mess, right, Even C isn't always cut right. Sometimes it's like circle. I don't say. Actually, when I was a kid, I used to say kirkle because to me, I was like C camp be both uh and cu. So either it's a circle, but it can't you know, you can't mix them. But it took me a while to figure that out. That's a that's a problem English has.

The only thing I remember from the actual learning part of reading and writing was trying to figure out what my parents were spelling to each other. I know they were spelling it, so I wouldn't know exactly that. I was like, what is that?

No secrets kept from my friend Zakia. So she's like, I've got to learn how to read quick quickly. I think all of our parents did that when they didn't want to want us to know what was going on.

You know, when we take all of that into account, it's really crazy to think that your ease of or your mastery of the written language depends on things that happened so long ago, like when you were three, four and five. Doctor Wilie really helped us hone in the importance of those early years.

Something we have to keep in mind about written language, like one of the biggest things that makes it different from spoken languages you have to learn it. So you know, you probably know that a child will learn any language you know, verbal that it grows up around effortlessly. No one has to teach them. You just learn your language. And that's not the case with written language. You have to be instructed to learn it.

That's such a good point, right, It's not inherent the ability to write and read. Somebody has to teach it, and so much of your ability to do this rest on the access to quality education at a young age.

And throughout history there have been people who have been denied that access. And it is only in very recent history that people have been allowed to learn how to read and write.

Up until not that long ago, very very few people could read and write, you know, so you think that, oh, but they had written language in ancient Egypt, and you're like, sure, for twenty people who are like recording things in the court, right, Like, no one, hardly anyone knew how to do this.

This wasn't granted at the same time to all.

People, and it's not at the same level, even though it's granted now, definitely not at the same level. In fact, a lot of schools now are de emphasizing the importance of learning handwriting since so many of us are using phones and computers to write keyboards.

Basically, cursive has mostly gone from schools, and even just the time given to handwriting it's really decreased because it's not part of them, right, it's not technically science, technology, education or math. But you know what some of us always point is, you don't do any of those things without reading and writing. Like, please try to do a science project without reading something. Please try to do that,

Aspect, and it's not just about needing to write in order to study other subjects. Writing by hand also helps us actually learn better.

You can, for example, take people who either children who are still just learning language or adults learning in new alphabets, so as they're learning the letters, they actually learned to write them by hand. There's all kinds of benefits. So in terms of behavior, they are going to memorize those letters more quickly, they're going to retain them for longer compared to if you just study them visually or if you learn them by typing as well.

And this rings true for me specifically, because that is the way that I learned pretty much all things. And it started in high school for me when I realized, oh, my goodness, I think I've cracked the code on how to really memorize or learn some things. Because I was awful in biology, just awful. It was really really hard for me to remember all of these things. So what I started doing was this. If my teacher said, oh, we're going to be having a quiz on chapter three.

For me, it's also reading handwriting that makes a difference for me if I have notes and I go back and I can remember things like I can see, oh, I wrote this. There has also been some evidence about the tie in for other people reading handwriting. It's also a teaching strategy where folks are adding handwriting to type texts to help you retain information.

So what do we know about why that might be. Well, here's a few things we know about that. When we look at things like letters, we don't just look at the pattern in terms of a static image. We also automatically think about how was that created? And this is especially true when we're reading handwriting as opposed to print. And that's why when people are reading, we see all kinds of activity in the motor part of the brain, there's a lot of activity in the part of the

So we've learned a lot about writing from a historical perspective, but also psychological and sociological. We're going to take a quick break and when we get back, we're going to talk all about the biological aspects of writing and reading. What's actually happening in our brains. And we're back, let's actually talk about the brain and what's happening when we see letters.

So the first stage is a stimulus. This is just seeing letters on the page.

When we look at say just a single word, right like cat when you are a fluent reader. All right, so let's just talk about adults. It's a separate thing. You know, with children who are in they're first learning, but once you're adult and you know how to read, all that process it's automatized to the point that you cannot help but recognize that word. And that's because the average adult has read billions of letters. By the time they're say forty or fifty, you've seen billions of letters.

This relates back to what doctor Wiley was saying earlier about the origins of letters. We see them everywhere, not just in nature, but in our day to day lives. We're just exposed to letters all the time.

What we do really quickly when we're reading is we actually abstract from what we're seeing. Whether I write kat by hand, or I see it typed in you know, capital letters, or I see it in lowercase letters, we really quickly abstract away that information at some level is sort of discarded by the brain.

Your brain takes what it needs and it discards everything else. It doesn't care about the font, if it's handwritten or tight, the color, none of that matters. It just goes straight to processing.

So once you've taken in c at there's actually two routes that the brain can take to process that information.

So the first route we call the phonological route.

Phonological is sounding it out. You're using your memory, but you're trying to remember the sounds of each letter. So C is A T to cat cat.

And then we go into our long term memory, and that long term memory is for the sounds of words. So then we're searching. We're saying, okay, have I heard that sound cat? And then you say, oh yeah, I have that story in my long term memory. And then I say, oh yeah, cat, it's an animal, it's feeling, it's a pet. And that's how we identify the word through a phonological route. But we have another route, and it's an orthographic route.

Orthographic is when I see these string of letters, I remember they mean a thing. So it's the string of letters and remembering the meaning. No sound is associated with this. You're skipping the sound all together.

What it does. It says I have this abstract representation that the letters are C, A, and T, and then we go into our long term memory, not for the sound, but just have I seen this string of letters in this order? And then I say, oh yes, When I see that string of letters, it means a fee line, a small animal, a pet, all of that. So what we do is we always do that when we see any word, we try in both ways to figure out

So it's like you see the letters c at and then they shoot off the gun, and it's like whoever gets there first is the winner. Even as an adult, when you get to a word that you don't know.

That's so funny. I don't feel the orthological as much. I do recognize when I shift back to phonological absolutely, And sometimes there's a little trick where I do a blend of both. You know, when we see a new word in science or medicine and probably engineering too, we have some tricks from root words that we've learned Latin or Greek that help us kind of make sense of what a word might mean. And those things aren't related

I remember it, and I remember being like, oh my gosh, look how advanced my brain is. I don't even need these letters to be in order. Your girls smart and doctor Wiley definitely just made me feel.

Duped.

What happened in that thing is that they were really careful about how they jumbled the words. So there are some words where it's true that if you switch around the letters you still know what that is. So say, we're like judge j u dge. If you see ju gde right, if it looks like jug d you know that that's judge, because there's nothing else that looks like that. So they're careful that they only use words like that.

Yeah, So in that fake study that they put out. They were very intentional about the words that they chose, and they had us all out here thinking that our brains worked a certain way that they don't.

Doctor Wylie tells us, we're not really good at knowing exactly the order of letters when we're looking at them. So there's a question of what we actually know when we figure out what a word is, and when you feel like you know it, what concrete things do you know about it? And I think that's what scientists are still trying to figure out.

So when we see a word and that gun goes off in our brain, and our brain starts shooting off phonological and orthological, those two routes, and whoever wins wins. But where are they racing too?

So there's this part of the brain that's called it's called several things, so it's been called the brain's letterbox or the visual word form area. It's typically in the left hemisphere and a part of the temporal lobe called the fusiform gyros.

And you have to remember that the brain is split into two hemispheres, kind of left and right, and the fusiform gyros is on both.

So the fusiform gyros in the right hemisphere, so the homologous part, the same part across the hemisphere is specialized for face processing. It's so it's called the fusiform face area in the right hemisphere, and then we have the visual word form area and the left hemisphere.

And we see that the brain changes as children begin to learn to read.

When you're first showing them letters, it's very bilateral, so you'll see particular amounts of activity in both the left and the right hemispheres when they're looking at words before they can really read them. And then as we become more expert in reading and writing, that activity shifts further to the left. It lateralizes.

We're using that fusiform gyvis in the left hemisphere to recall those words for reading and writing.

So this sounds like to me that reading is strongly tied to memory.

Yes, memory plays a big role in reading and writing. And there's quite a bit happening when we think about that race that is basically an obstacle course.

Honestly, and for some people that obstacle course is instead of it just being you know, a little puddle that you got to jump over, it's a brick wall that you gotta climb.

Doctor Wilie takes us through two examples, dyslexia and dysgraphia.

So dyslexia is about reading. Dysgraphia is about the spelling, and that can happen developmentally, of course, and we know many children have those issues.

But you can also acquire dyslexia and dysgraphia through traumatic brain injury or stroke, and when this happens it's called a phasia.

Dyslexia is about reading, So a person with dyslexia has difficulty associating sounds or different speech sounds within a word, in learning how the letters represent the sound. So this is more phonological.

So when we think about that that race, when that gun goes off their phonological route, there could be some obstacles in the way that causes that portion of the race to go slower.

And dysgraphia is more about writing and.

Spe There's one really cool study that worked with dysgraphic patients and what they found is there's patterns of behavior when things go wrong. So for example, some individuals their deficit, the longer the word is, the more likely they are to make an error. And what we know from then is that this is a what we call orthographic working memory problem. So when you go to spell a word, when you go to write a word, you have to

Sometimes it's a problem of losing your place remembering what you've already said versus what comes next. Sometimes it's a case of not being able to clear your memory.

And that's in a different part of the brain than the long term storage. So you find other people where it doesn't matter whether the words three letters or ten letters. That has nothing to do with their deficits. It's all about the frequency. What do those people do? And this also happens with dyslexia. You're going to rely on that

And we know nothing is as it seems in the English language. We got to be easier on ourselves. You know, if we're all out here trying to spill it right, get it right, put the punctuation in the right order, make sure we say the word right, we retrieve the right word. This is almost like a false construct we're putting on our minds. We didn't evolve a capacity for this, like we're enforcing this. This is why you have to teach. It is not innate speaking learning the spoken language that

Can't lay your head on these books and get these words.

Don't work like that. And so when we really think about it, we're forcing our brains to do something that is not designed to do. And that's kind of cool, but it's also meaning that we got to give these brains some room to make some mistakes.

One of the things that's so cool to think about with the written language is we know that evolutionarily, right, there's not been time for this to evolved. And one of the questions that makes us try to understand is how are we able to do something that we know we didn't evolve any capacity to do? So we have to be using some part of the brain that will let us read and write that didn't evolve to do that, And so people wonder, well, what does that part of the brain do if you don't know how to read

Evolutionarily, reading is not critical to survival, and the only times that we have evolved as a species is in order to survive. So what it takes for us to be able to live.

And not just to live, but to live long enough to reproduce?

Ah okay, because I mean it's true there are people who don't know how to read and write and they're still able to function in society. We haven't gotten to that point evolutionarily where it is absolutely necessary, so then we would eventually change our brains to need that ability.

Compare reading and writing to speaking. So if you think about it, we have communication centers in the brain because you have to be able to communicate if you're going to get to a stage where you're reproducing with another human, right, right, and so that can be sign language, that can be multiple ways of communication. But we have evolved the communication

But that's not true for reading and writing.

You can still communicate even if you can't read and write. There's no selective pressure on reading and writing.

Also, the ability to write does not put you at a evolutionary advantage. No, not yet, not yet. And I feel like my handwriting, but I do feel like my handwriting does put me at a social disadvantage currently, and so I want to know if there is anything that people when they see my handwriting if there's anything that people can assume about me, because I think no. But we ask doctor Wiley if there was any information that you could discern from someone's handwriting.

It definitely tells you something. So here's one thing what I know about that, and like how people vary. So one thing we if there's some research on, is the fact that so people will typically tend to write letters more or less the same, but there is a lot of variability there and some of it is what we call individual differences, and some of it is more cultural. So for example, exit and other parts of the world, like in Britain, So you probably do one of the

No no news. Yes, how are you going to make sure those things touch just at the right place? That's crazy.

I was glad to hear that. Doctor Wilie said that really the only thing that you can really take away from somebody's handwriting might be just where they grew up, Like it's just a geographic thing. Like in this area of the world, folks write certain letters. This way, and there's really nothing else you can you can get from that. You can't assume anything about their personality, So that that kind of makes me feel a little bit better about my thick letters.

Does this mean you'll share your handwriting with all of our listeners?

Oh, man, I see out of feeling you were gonna do this, I will do it. If Zakiya does it. If you put up your handwriting, I will also put up mine.

I'm gang.

We'll post on our Instagram our writing samples, yes, and our comments will be.

Closed to shade. Okay, you know, I feel like there are a thousand questions we could ask, and doctor Wilie really got us together so we could understand just how complex written language is. There's honestly no limit to where written language has influence. And that's what I learned from doctor Willie answering all of our questions, is that it's way deeper than what we think is deeper than rep I remember our first question to him was like, what

There's a lot going on, so there's a there's a lot to unpack. And one of the things that I always have to think about when you know, when people want to talk about things like this is you have to think kind of about the like the level of analysis that you're interested in, you know, even if you just want to talk about the brain. So what are the neurals substrates that support reading and writing? It really depends like, well, what do you mean when you mean writing?

That's it for Lab thirty, but we have so much more for you to dig into on our website. Go to Dope Labs podcasts.

On our website, you can find a cheat sheet for today's episode, along with a ton of other links and resources in our show notes, and.

If you want to stay in the know with Dope Labs, don't forget to sign up for our newsletter too. Here basically will become our virtual pimpal.

Special Thanks to our guest expert, doctor Robert Wiley, visit his blog at writing Brain dot blog. You can find out more about his work in our show notes.

Also, we love hearing from you. What did you think about today's lab? What are your ideas for future labs? Our number is two zero two five six seven seven zero two eight. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Dope Labs podcast.

Tt is on Twitter at d r Underscore t Sho, and you can find Zakia at z said So.

Follow us on Spotify or wherever else you listen to your podcast.

Dope Labs is produced by Jenny Rattle at Mask of Wave Runner Studios.

Mixing sound design by Hannis Brown.

Taka Yasuzawa and Alex Sugiura composed our theme music, with addition music by Elijah Lex Harvey.

Dope Labs is a production of Spotify and Mega Owned Media Group, and it's executive produced by us T T show Dia and Zakiah Wattley, you know something that I realized I haven't used in a while, But you know I Message has that feature where when you turn the phone to the side, you can actually write with your finger.

Yes.

Well, the thing is is that it never knows what I'm writing, So I guess these letters just too voluptuous.