Humans began to develop systems of reading and writing only within the past few thousand years.
Humans began to develop systems of reading and writing only within the past few thousand years. Our reading abilities set us apart from other animal species, but a few thousand years is much too short a timeframe for our brains to have evolved new areas specifically devoted to reading.
To account for the development of this skill, some scientists have hypothesized that parts of the brain that originally evolved for other purposes have been “recycled” for reading. As one example, they suggest that a part of the visual system that is specialized to perform object recognition has been repurposed for a key component of reading called orthographic processing — the ability to recognize written letters and words.
A new study from MIT neuroscientists offers evidence for this hypothesis. The findings suggest that even in nonhuman primates, who do not know how to read, a part of the brain called the inferotemporal (IT) cortex is capable of performing tasks such as distinguishing words from nonsense words, or picking out specific letters from a word.
Read more at Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Image: A new study from MIT neuroscientists offers evidence that the brain’s inferotemporal cortex, which is specialized to perform object recognition, has been repurposed for a key component of reading called orthographic processing — the ability to recognize written letters and words. CREDIT: Jose-Luis Olivares, MIT
