Literacy’s imprint on the brain

Learning to read—even in adulthood—is a sufficiently important experience for the brain that it reallocates some of its resources, so that other functions like face recognition have to give up some of their turf, new research suggests. Reading is a relatively recent invention in human history, so researchers generally believe that our brains adapt on the fly when learning how to read, rather than relying upon evolutionarily ancient mechanisms for processing visual information. Stanislas Dehaene and colleagues in France, Brazil, Portugal and Belgium used fMRI to scan the brains of 63 Portuguese and Brazilian participants who fell into three groups: adults who cannot read, adults who learned to read as children, and adults who learned to read as adults. (In contrast, most adult neuroimaging experiments are performed in highly educated college students.) The results showed that reading improves the processing of horizontally oriented visual stimuli in the occipital cortex and also leads to the appearance of an area specialized for words in the temporal cortex. The area in the temporal cortex devoted to face-processing shrinks, though the authors say more research will be necessary to determine whether this actually causes our face-recognition abilities to suffer. Similar changes occurred in the adults who learned to read as adults, indicating that these neural pathways remain able to support learning in adulthood.

Article #22: "How Learning to Read Changes the Cortical Networks for Vision and Language," by S. Dehaene; F. Pegado; A. Jobert; G. Dehaene-Lambertz at INSERM in Gif sur Yvette, France; S. Dehaene; F. Pegado; A. Jobert; G. Dehaene-Lambertz at CEA in Gif sur Yvette, France; S. Dehaene; F. Pegado; A. Jobert; G. Dehaene-Lambertz at University Paris 11 in Orsay, France; S. Dehaene at Collège de France in Paris, France; L.W. Braga; G. Nunes Filho at SARAH Network - International Center for Neurosciences and Rehabilitation in Brasilia, Brazil; P. Ventura at University of Lisbon in Lisbon, Portugal; R. Kolinsky; J. Morais at Université Libre de Bruxelles (U.L.B.) in Brussels, Belgium; R. Kolinsky at Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (F.N.R.S) in Brussels, Belgium; L. Cohen at Université Pierre et Marie Curie-Paris 6 in Paris, France; L. Cohen at AP-HP, Groupe hospitalier Pitié-Salpêtrière in Paris, France.