Sublime

The first is the fact that although it took our species roughly 2,000 years to make the cognitive breakthroughs necessary to learn to read with an alphabet, today our children have to reach those same insights about print in roughly 2,000 days. The second concerns the evolutionary and educational implications of having a “rearranged” brain for lear

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young novice readers tend to move through three short, fairly predictable steps. First, they make errors that are semantically and syntactically appropriate, but that bear no phonological or orthographic resemblance to the real word (“daddy” for “father”). Once they learn some rules of grapheme-phoneme correspondence, their errors show orthographic

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I speak as an unregenerate reader, one who still believes that language and not technology is the true evolutionary miracle. I have not yet given up on the idea that the experience of literature offers a kind of wisdom that cannot be discovered elsewhere; that there is profundity in the verbal encounter itself, never mind what further profundities

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But we can also ask the opposite question: Are there regions that are more active among bad readers and whose activity decreases as one learns to read? The answer is positive: in illiterates, the brain’s responses to faces are more intense. The better we read, the more this activity decreases in the left hemisphere, at the exact place in the cortex... See more