The brain isn’t hardwired to read – here’s how we pull it off and why some are better at it than others

By Mikael Roll, Professor of Phonetics, Lund University

For an experienced reader, recognising the words on this page feels effortless. Yet, evolutionarily speaking, your brain shouldn’t be able to read. Reading has existed for too short a time to have shaped a dedicated centre in the brain.

Therefore, the brain has to learn to read using systems that evolved for other purposes. But it has long been unclear exactly which systems it recruits to do so and how.

This is important, as…

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