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Overview
When we read a book, magazine or text message on our phone, do we ever stop to think about how amazing it is that these squiggly lines can come alive and form words? Somehow, the brain has learned this skill. In order to understand how amazing this ability is, let’s look at what happens when you read.
This passage uses history, evolution and neuroscience to explain how humans first learned to read, how reading restructures our brain and why some brains struggle with it. It also explains that everyone deserves the right support to develop this skill.
After you read this article, you’ll know why Mark Twain hated English spelling; what Einstein’s brain reveals about dyslexia; and how Socrates foreshadowed today’s tech skepticism.
Big Idea #1: When humans started writing, our brains rearranged themselves to take on the challenge of reading.
The history of reading is complicated, but it’s clear that writing helped us learn how to read. It seems that humans began to record information through visual symbols long before there were any alphabets with different letters representing distinct sounds of a particular language.
One of the earliest examples can be found in a cave in South Africa. Archeologists have uncovered stones marked with cross-hatching dating to approximately 80,000 years ago. Although it’s not known what these markings represent, there are other examples of early cultures using similarly marked objects for economic transactions, so researchers believe that they’re not just random scribbles but carry meaning.
The discovery of abstract symbols was a revolutionary idea. It changed the way we recorded events for future generations and, ultimately, it changed our brains.
The key message is that when humans started writing, their brains changed to accommodate the changes in communication. Their brains have billions of neurons (nerve cells) connected by synapses (connections). These neurons can change themselves and form new connections depending on how they’re used. Scientists call this phenomenon “neural plasticity”.
When humans first learned to read, they formed new neural pathways in their brains that allowed them to detect and decode visual symbols at rapid speed. This skill was so powerful that it became automatic for people to read the words on a page.
Neuroscientists have found that when humans look at unfamiliar letter-like shapes, only a small part of the visual areas in our brain are activated. However, when we see letters we know, more parts of the visual area and other specialized areas related to language processing, hearing and abstract concepts are activated.
One of the first connections formed in our ancestors’ brains as they learned to read was between a part of the back of the brain called the angular gyrus, which is responsible for association, and areas involved in object recognition. This neuronal breakthrough led to some of the first complex writing systems.
Big Idea #2: The first alphabets revolutionized both our ability to record our thoughts — and our thoughts themselves.
Writing was invented independently in several parts of the world. The earliest writing systems were cuneiform, which looks like bird tracks, and hieroglyphs, which are a form of picture writing used by ancient Egyptians. They originated entirely independently from one another around 3200 BCE in Mesopotamia and ancient Egypt.
Both systems, hieroglyphs and alphabet, were effective for administration and accounting. They were both pictographic; the symbols roughly resembled what they represented. The Egyptian “hieroglyph” for “house,” which looks like an old house seen from above as gods would see it, formed a nexus of paths between three areas: visual associations, frontal lobes to analyze the diagrammics created by the consonants and vowels that tied together into simple pictures representing meanings on predefined themes such as loss movement or speech elements, objects in agricultural activities or events at home or out in nature.
