I'm struggling to think of any way to test the hypothesis which is (A) practical and (B) accurate.

For example, suppose you sampled a group today and found an inverse-correlation between "good at recognizing many faces" and "good at recognizing written text"... That still wouldn't show that one facility grew causing the other to shrink, because maybe people are just born (or early-development-ed) with a certain bias.

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3 days ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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suddenlybananas 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The part of the brain that recognises faces quite literally shrinks in literates compared to illiterates

https://www.unicog.org/publications/1-s2.0-S1364661311000738...

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Terr_ 3 days ago | parent [-]

I'm quite willing to believe that human brains do Weird Stuff with respect to reusing circuits and development, but I still don't see how they concluded "the skill encourages the brain state" by disproving "the brain state encourages the acquisition of the skill."

It would be ethically difficult to randomly assigned children to groups (A) taught to read versus (B) forced to remain illiterate while ensuring both groups had the same number of people's faces in their social circles.

	▲	psidium 3 days ago \| parent [-]
		IIRC the author compares brain scans and recognition abilities of children of hunter gatherers that where sent to school vs same age relatives that were not. I’m bringing this up from memory now and I’m not so sure of this, but this claim stems from some studies of the author

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psidium 3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

The author uses mostly hunter-gatherers tribes/societies in different continents as the control groups, usually. Most of his work is in anthropology.