Talking or speech is the primary mode of learning. When a baby is born, understanding the sounds that came out of the mouth and relating these sounds to a concept is a necessity because it allows the newborn person to understand the world. It allows people to communicate.
The ability to read doesn’t come naturally. Ordinarily, we learn to read only because we are taught at school. Thus, unlike talking, the ability to read is something that we must have the intention of learning.
We learn to read at an early age by going to school. Illiterate adults teach themselves. Dyslexic people, despite the hardwired inability to read, try to learn like normal people do. Although some people have difficulty doing it so, it’s still doable as long as you have the will and desire.
What is it then that makes reading a very complex process?
The science of how we read tells us that interpreting the letters and words is more than visual[24]. It, in fact, involves not just our eyes but our memory and auditory senses as well.
To understand how the brain can process several words in one second, scientists were able to come up with a new way of observing the brain as a person reads up an entire text. They found out that letters are not processed individually; rather, it is the whole word which is seen as an image. Thus, the assumption before that the brain does not process and associate words with meanings may not be true at all.
When we read, a certain region of the brain is activated in the same way that it works when processing images and shapes.
Moreover, it turns out that sound is an integral part of the reading process. The Broca region is that part which processes language as we hear words being spoken aloud and even when we are planning to speak. The same kind of neural activity also responds as we read silently, as if – as the scientists say – we hear the text being spoken internally.
Consequently, this discovery toppled the previous assumption that the brain processes words as “neural-symbolic patterns of their meaning”. Rather, language is processed and encoded in the brain as shapes and sounds.