And finally, a peep at the cerebellum: this sits, looking a bit like a small cauliflower, tucked in behind and below our cerebral cortices. It has important functions in motor control, especially in the controlled performance of intensively-learned and automated movements like playing tennis, or the piano or driving the car. In our present state of knowledge the cerebellum is considered of minor importance to literacy, though it is very extensively linked with the ‘thinking’ cerebral cortex. This may have something to do with the apparently close involvement of motor memories, particularly pain, in some areas of ‘higher’ thought and perception. (Thelen 1995, Wall 1997 and notes to this chapter.) Some theorists (e.g. Nicholson and Fawcett 1999) also claim that developmental dyslexia is caused by inherited defects in the cerebellum. I examine dyslexia in critical depth in chapter eight and refer you to this discussion for a critique of this peculiar claim. I will otherwise not talk much more about the cerebellum in this book as I believe it is peripheral to our purpose. Time will tell, of course…

For the purposes of this essay on the cognitive psychology of literacy (and perhaps a little wrongly, as you can see), we are now going to concentrate upon the ‘higher’ levels of the forebrain, the cerebral cortex. Here we have Hercule Poirot’s ‘little grey cells’. Here, we still more or less believe, is the thinking equipment, the domain, probably, of the conscious, aware self – whatever that means. Here, we still believe, is the management of higher-level information, the sorting, combining and re-combining of ideas, consciously or otherwise. This is probably where ‘we’ live, intellectually at any rate; the place where all those debates as to who or what we are, whether God exists, what consciousness is all about, whether England will ever win the world cup again and where I last used the soldering iron actually go on. It is also where activities like literacy take place, at least in the main. This unbelievable cerebral cortex is a two metre square sheet of nerve cells, about half a centimetre thick, folded up all over the surface of the brain. It is what you see when you look at a brain, therefore, as in figure 1.1.

Figure 1.1 The left brain seen from the side.