Η βασική εργασία στον τόμο η οποία αναφέρεται στον ρόλο που διαδραμάτισε η γραφή των φωνηέντων είναι στο 19ο κεφάλαιο (The Role of Vowels in Alphabetic Writing, Baudouin Jurdant), με τελικό συμπέρασμα: «According to the suggestions made by Gazzaniga et al. (1977), one finds oneself in the presence of the very mechanisms that presided over the emergence of consciousness as produced by a quasi-permanent commentary by the left hemisphere on our sensorimotor reactions to vocalic graphic data. This hypothesis would explain why the Greek version of the alphabet led to completely new writing practices, which deeply modified the cultural space of the Mediterranean world.
As Finley (1983) has observed, this writing system, which was initially used by the Greek bards and rhapsodists for the transcription of stories in the oral tradition, very quickly gave birth to new texts that were not written in the Homeric or Hesiodic epic style. These were the texts of authors, designed for the poetic evocation of intimate emotions and personal feelings. Instead of being used for the recording of important events or solemn declarations, writing was used for the individualized expressions of the internal psychic life of the poet. Such texts spotlighted a new dimension of consciousness: a private dimension.»
Τέλος, για τον επαναπρογραμματισμό του εγκεφάλου τα ανέφερε ήδη η SBE για το 20ό κεφάλαιο, απ' όπου εγώ προσθέτω μόνο απ' τα συμπεράσματα: «Metaphorically, one could say that this was the beginning of artificial intelligence. There is not much that is "natural" about Western intelligence. Indeed, I am considering the possibility that the adoption of the alphabet by Western cultures has had a reordering effect on the brain and the whole nervous system of literate people, including their sensory modes (de Kerckhove, 1981, 1982), an effect comparable to changing the program of a computer. With full phonetization, writing seems to have acquired a precision, a flexibility, and a paradoxical meaninglessness that is comparable to computer programming codes. I do not mean by this that alphabetic writing has turned people into computerized automatons, but that it made language available for a kind of information processing which is, technically, and especially in scientific investigations, very close to a mathematical model.
In evolutionary terms, with the advent of the Greek alphabet, the development of writing moved further and further away from the context of immediate experience, and took up its place as the abstract code of reality. It became possible to read meaningfully strings of visual speechforms that contained radically new ideas, concepts, or notions, some of which could even be completely foreign to the reader as he or she did not have to depend upon previous knowledge to decipher them. Hence, the origin of the first truly comprehensive scientific investigations was dependent upon a system of archival recording that was not bound to the traditional usages of oral speech, but only to the specialization of reliable written documents based on progressively more reliable empirical observations. This conclusion has intuitively and tentatively been reached by many scientists and cultural observers, and its consequences for the reinterpretation of cultural differences and historical developments may require a paradigmatic shift in scientific and scholarly investigations.»
