What your brain does when you crack that summer novel Even if you don’t consider yourself a “reader,” you read all the time. Signs, instructions, articles, bills, blogs, newspaper headlines and grocery lists all depend on literacy. Literature is the icing on the cake. Reading permeates so much of our lives, and yet human civilization has only been literate for a tiny sliver of our history. Ancient texts suggest that writing and reading had already been developed in Mesopotamia roughly 5,000 years ago, but it is only in the last 300 years that literacy rates have skyrocketed. Why did it take thousands of years to bring reading to the masses? Put simply, our brains were not made to read. The reading brain Most of us have forgotten the work we put into learning to read because, once learned, the practice is natural and automatic. So automatic, in fact, that it is nearly impossible not to read when you look at a familiar word. As children, reading is far from automatic. We all spen...
