Shapes of Letters
Is there any pattern to the letters across written languages, asks Stanislas Dehaene in Reading in the Brain . At first sight, it seems like an idiotic question: the Roman, Arabic, Devanagari and Chinese scripts hardly resemble each other in any way. But look at things a little differently, and a pattern emerges. Perhaps, one hypothesis goes, certain letter-like shapes are omnipresent in what we see around ourselves. For example: The frequency of these shapes is even higher if rotated shapes are counted as the same shape: If you felt that rotating the shapes and still thinking of them as the same letter is cheating, think again: our brain adjusts for orientations – how else would it recognize the same object again, when it is viewed from a different angle? Next, consider these drawings, where the same shape is drawn with varying degrees of completeness: Notice how the middle column is almost interpretable whereas the first column isn’t? Why is tha...