Stanislas Dehaene

Reading in the Brain

1. IDEA 1

   Reading reuses ancient brain circuits

   Dehaene, a cognitive neuroscientist, explains how the human brain learns to read. Writing is too recent for the brain to have evolved for it, so reading must repurpose circuits that evolved for other tasks.

2. IDEA 2

   One area recognises words

   Dehaene describes the visual word form area, sometimes called the brain's letterbox, which responds to written words. It appears in the same place in readers of many languages. This suggests that the brain has a common basis for reading.

3. IDEA 3

   Brains recycle neurons

   Dehaene proposes neuronal recycling: cultural skills like reading take over brain areas originally used for recognising objects. In his view, writing was invented to fit the brain's existing abilities, not the other way around, so reading uses old circuits in a new way.

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