How reading changes the way your brain works - BBC World Service

Clicking on this video activated circuits in your brain that took thousands of years to develop the ones required for reading. We think of language as natural and reading is written language, so it must be natural. But it isn't. It isn't natural at all.

Scientific studies indicate that a neurotypical brain is born with the circuitry that allows our eyes to see and our vocal cords to produce sounds, but it doesn't innately have the ability to read. From an evolutionary time scale, our brain hasn't had enough time to develop a dedicated reading brain.

And so to build a reading brain network, we co-opt parts of the brain involved in vision and auditory processing, and language and attention and affect. The Sumerian cuneiform symbols are thought to be one of the earliest writing systems in the world,

dating back to around 3300 BC. Around the same time, though, Egyptians started developing their hieroglyphics. Symbols evolved over time. The more we read and wrote, the more sophisticated they became becoming the letters and characters we recognise today.

Scientists now know that reading activates the brain so that letters and words become associated with sounds and meanings. Reading is really a whole brain process. It involves activation and all four lobes of the cortex. The process of developing a reading brain alters everything

from brain activity to brain structure and brain connectivity. And the language we read also shapes our brain. Chinese characters, for instance, are an example of the logographic system.

Each object or idea is represented by a symbol rather than by a set of letters of the alphabet. Research indicates that learning logographic writing systems activates different areas of the brain than learning an alphabet-based language like English.

The areas involved in visual memory and visual association do more of the work. This theory was corroborated after scientists studied a bilingual patient who knew both Chinese and English. The man suffered a massive stroke, which affected some areas of his brain,