When you acquire a specific skill, your brain will change and there will be neural reorganization. This update will leave a special area in the occipital-temporal area of your left abdomen, which will affect the facial recognition mechanism of the right hemisphere of the brain, weaken your tendency to carry out overall visual processing, improve your vocabulary, and make your corpus callosum bigger. The corpus callosum is an “information highway” connecting the left and right hemispheres of the brain.
How to explain these changes at the neurological and psychological levels?
You may have a higher education. After you learn to read, perhaps as a child, your brain will be reorganized to better adapt to your efforts, which is both functional and the result of your mind inadvertently.
In this way, to explain these changes in your brain-such as the increase of corpus callosum and the decrease of facial recognition ability-we need to ask: When did your parents, community and government start to think that reading ability is necessary for everyone? Why is this happening? Here, a mystery of neuroscience and cognition has become a historical issue.
Of course, the writing system has a history of thousands of years, and it was established as early as ancient Sumer, China and Egypt, but in most civilized societies, only a few people have the ability to read, and the proportion generally does not exceed 10%. Since when do people think that everyone should learn to read? May be accompanied by rapid economic growth in the 19th century? Or did this idea come from the intellectual class who advocated rationality and rationality in the 18th century Enlightenment?
No, it comes from a religious mutation in the 16th century. After centuries of periodic brewing, the belief that “everyone should be able to read and interpret the Bible by himself” spread rapidly in Europe and promoted the outbreak of the Religious Reform. The representative event is the Ninety-Five Theses published by Martin Luther in 1517. Protestants began to believe that both boys and girls must teach themselves the Bible, so that they can know God better. In the process of spreading Protestantism, the literacy rate of the audience in Britain, Sweden and the Netherlands has surpassed that of Italy and France, which were more international at that time. For eternal salvation, parents and political leaders try their best to ensure their children’s reading ability.
The research team of economists Sascha Becker and Ludger Woessmann conducted the most rigorous test of this view. Historical data, including Luther’s self-report, show that Protestantism spread from Luther’s base in Vittenburg (the Principality of Saxony) to all German states. Baker and Wusman investigated the data of literacy rate and enrollment rate in Prussia in the 19th century, and pointed out that counties with more Protestants (compared with Catholics) were also better in literacy rate and enrollment rate. This shows a certain correlation. They also show that thanks to the spread centered on Vittenburg in history, the proportion of Protestants in counties and cities will decrease by 10 percentage points every 100 kilometers from Vittenburg. Subsequently, they used a little statistical skills to capture the variation of Protestantism in the process of communication from this model. In a sense, these variations came from the “shock wave” of the Reformation, which spread outward from the “epicenter” of Vittenburg. Finally, they pointed out that more Protestants did bring higher literacy rate and enrollment rate. The literacy rate of new religious counties is nearly 20 percentage points higher than that of all Catholic counties. The follow-up study focused on the religious reform in Switzerland, with Zurich and Geneva as the epicentres, and found that its model was strikingly similar to that of German states.
Luther’s residence in Vittenburg Image source: StephenDickson/CC by-SA4.0
The influence of Protestantism on literacy and education is still clearly visible today. For example, the spread of Protestantism and Catholicism in Africa and India had different influences. In Africa, the literacy rate of Protestant groups was about 16 percentage points higher than that of Catholic groups at the beginning of the 20th century (long ago). In some analysis, the spread of Catholicism has little effect on the literacy rate unless it faces a “spiritual struggle” with Protestant missionaries. A similar influence appeared in China in the early 20th century.
Protestantism’s emphasis on Bible reading ability changed the practice of Catholicism and inadvertently laid the foundation of modern schools. Tempered by the fire of the anti-Reformation, Jesuits also adopted many Protestant practices, including emphasizing school education and secular skills. A study of indigenous people in Paraguay, Argentina and Brazil found that the closer a community is to the historical Jesuits (which existed from 1609 to 1767), the higher its literacy rate today. Comparatively speaking, in the same area, being adjacent to Franciscans has nothing to do with their modern literacy rate-Franciscans were born three centuries before the Reformation and did not accept Protestant values.
The idea of popularizing state-funded school education is rooted in religious ideals. As early as 1524, Martin Luther emphasized that parents should ensure that their children can study, and the secular government also had the responsibility to build schools. This practice of establishing public schools driven by religion has made Prussia a model of public education, which has been followed by countries such as Britain and the United States.
In 1560, after the wave of Reformation spread to Scotland, john knox and his reformist comrades also called for the establishment of free public education for the poor. Their reason for defending this is that in order to better understand God, everyone needs to master relevant skills. In this way, the burden of running a school fell on the government. The first local school tax in the world was levied in 1633 and added in 1646.
This early universal education experiment may be the midwife of the Scottish Enlightenment, which produced many star intellectuals, such as david hume and Adam Smith. A century later, the inquisitiveness in this small area made Voltaire of France sigh, “When it comes to what civilization is, we will look to Scotland.” Voltaire grew up in the area controlled by Huguenots (French Calvinists) and went to Jesuit schools. Other stars in the Enlightenment, such as Diderot and condorcet, had similar experiences. Rousseau’s cultural accomplishment probably came from his Calvinist father, who settled in the Protestant-dominated city state of Geneva.
The story of literacy rate, Luther and your left ventral occipital-temporal area is only a small part of a grand and embryonic scientific picture. Our hearts, brains and even our biological structures are deeply shaped by social norms, values, systems, beliefs and languages handed down to us by the previous generation. By setting incentives and defining constraints, this world built by culture shapes our thoughts, feelings and consciousness-it corrects and calibrates the way our