Humans are not born with brains wired to read, but reading has the profound ability to rewire our brains
Over the three hundred thousand or so years of human history, our brain has evolved spectacular capabilities, and none are more wondrous than our ability to read.
It's difficult to imagine a world without literacy, but reading as we know it is a relatively young invention, dating back only a few thousand years.
Maryanne Wolf explains in her book Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain:
"With this invention, we rearranged the very organization of our brain, which in turn expanded the ways we were able to think, which altered the intellectual evolution of our species."
As every pre-school teacher knows too well, reading is not a genetically inbuilt skill, like talking. We need to be actively taught how to do it.
When the first scripts appeared, they took the form of pictograms, illustrating the objects they reflected: an ear of corn, a scythe, a man. Along the way, our brains developed the connections required to move away from literal symbols, simple object recognition, to decipher and recognize words, a kind of shorthand code for much greater concepts.
We're able to learn this code as a result of our brain's neuroplasticity, its ability to shape new pathways. Our reading power is the result of connections made by the brain between the areas responsible for visual, auditory, linguistic and conceptual tasks. Reading also activates the limbic system, responsible for emotion, learning and memory.
When we read, our brain is essentially performing a symphony of activity. And just like our ability to play the violin requires practice to excel, so too does our ability to read.
