A hundred and fifty years ago, three gifted sisters lived in this remote place.
It was a world dominated by books.
From childhood they all read voraciously, and in turn, they created their own stories.
They sisters turned an isolated home into a factory of imagination.
From inside their minds, their conjured up new worlds with unique characters.
They were the Bronet sisters, authors of masterpieces such as Jane Eyre, and Wuthering heights.
For all their love of books, the Bronets could have no idea what happened inside their brains
when they read and imagined.
Only now the modern neuroscience has shown that the effects of reading can be more extraordinary
than they could ever have dreamed.
New imagine technology like FMRI scanning allows us to observe the living brain at work.
It’s shown that, reading, something most of us take granted, can help unlock remarkable
powers.
Reading builds new connections in the brain, which in turn allow us to use written words
as stepping stones to understand other people’s worlds.
A good book literally has the power to change you.
But the technological ingenuity that’s giving us brain imagine has also spawned fabulous
new media, the internet, blogs, and video games.
It’s a digital revolution that some think challenges the old world of reading.
Time to show why, more than ever, reading matter.
I’ve already been fascinated by the way that things work, which is why I write about
science.
The most fascinating thing of all is this: the human brain.
It’s probably the most complex machine in the universe, and in some way it’s the most
powerful too.
In fact it’s so powerful that it’s even starting to understand itself.
When I started to write about psychology, the brain was effectively a black box, you
knew what it looks like on the inside, what’s going on in there was anybody’s guess.
We could only surmise it from the behavior that it produced.
But that changed in the 50s when we got new imaging technology which, for the first time,
could look inside a working living brain and see what was going on.
Since then we’ve learn a great deal about the brain, including the surprising extent
to which it’s shaped quite literally by experiences.
Lots of our cognitive skills, like speech for example, are wired-in, but others have
to be custom-built into each individual, and these include what is perhaps the most crucial
one of all: our ability to read.
And that’s why, although most of us take it for granted, reading is so remarkable.
Reading and writing don’t come naturally, so to do it, the brain must change.
Human beings were never born to read.
We were born to speak.
We were born to see, smell, hear, but never read.
What the human brain had to do, was to rearrange its existing parts.
So how did the human brain that evolved to speak make the leap to literacy?
How did our brain get from recognizing this to knowing what these abstract marks on the
page sound like and understand what they mean?
The first clue comes from the long history of our species, our distance ancestors lived
by hunting.
That may not seem to have very much to do with reading a book, but successful hunting
depends on visual skills that would, tens of thousands of years later, prime the mind
to read.
These early human needed to recognize fine differences between shapes, say, between a
useful stick and a deadly snake.
Barely visible animal tracks could warn of danger or of opportunity.
And honing these visual skills could mean the difference between life and death.
Then five thousand years ago those skills were adapted to server another purpose all
together when we invented the alphabet and started to read.
Ancient hunters become modern readers.
Part of the reading process involves areas that were and are being used for object recognition.
So our ability to use our visual areas, to immediately know what that object is, prey
or predator, is actually being recycled for us, enabled to be automatically recognizing
symbols.
Today it’s impossible to imagine a world without trillions of words, on strip signs,
and hoardings, and newspapers, books, magazine, and normally internet.
We live in a world saturated with written language.
So how did the brain get rewired to read?
To understand how we do know things which we do do constantly, you need to know tricky
things about the brain.
One is that it’s modular, that is: different bits of it specialize in doing different things.
And the other is that it is plastic, the bits change.
The modules work together, to produce some of an infinite range of behavior.
You can think of it as a… sort of legos, that can be built up to do one thing, and
then dismantled and built again in a different way to do something else entirely.
Same bits, different function.
One of the most dramatic demonstrations of the brain’s ability to reshape itself came
from some surprising subjects: London cabbies.
Their brains provided the living data for a now famous piece of neuroscientific detective
works.
It looked into a place of their brain called the hippocampus, it’s a bit sort of right
in here, and it’s a bit that we all use when we are finding our way about.
It helps to code and retrieve knowledge about space.
Of course taxi drivers know more about that than any of us because they have to do this
thing called ‘the knowledge’, which includes two years of becoming familiar with all the
backstreets of London.
What researchers found when they looked at the cab drivers’ hippocampus was that bit
of the brain was measurably bigger than it is in ordinary people.
what’s now, if you look at this guy’s brain in the scanner, you see that his hippocampus
was firing away like crazy as he finds his way around the streets.
And it’s that constantly firing away at that particular bit of the brain that builds
that area up and makes the module particularly strong.
The taxi driver study shows that the human brain can adapt to fresh challenges, and in
the case of these cabbies, which is storing an entire map of the London streets inside
their heads.
So does that mean that our brain has a special part like the hippocampus that gets muscles
up to read?
So often in the study of the mind, the most revealing clues have come from the brains
that, for some reason, can no longer perform particular tasks.
Last year, Terry Jone attended a friend’s fortieth birthday party.
A day after, he woke to find the world had changed.
The next morning, I got up.
Go to have a shower and I couldn’t read what was the shower, and what was the shampoo
and anything else.
They were just in another language.
And I said to my partner and I said: can you pour me some shampoo, I can’t read it, it
must be in foreign language, and she just laughed, and she told me don’t be stupid,
and she said I don’t know, you are joking.
I said Okay.
Anyway I wasn’t.
So I went downstairs to breakfast, and I got the menu, and I just couldn’t read anything,
it just looked as though it’s another language.
So when you look at the letters, what did you actually see?
I could see letters, it could say: breakfast, and I could read letters, but those letters
didn’t make a word.
Do you understand what I mean?
So could you understand that the B is B and the R is R?
I can understand the B and the R, and… but I couldn’t put them together to make any
sense.
It was…
It was as if it’s another language, I just couldn’t read it as a word.
Checked it in the hospital, and I had it tested and proved that
Terry’s case fascinated scientists at universities, colleges in London.
In the neuroscience department, a team led by Cathy Price used an MRI scanner to discover
which region of Terry’s brain had been damaged.
They hoped it would help to pinpoint the parts of the brain normally involved in reading.
You can see it here, so we’ve got three angels of the brain here.
Where at this blue cross here, there’s a big black mark, so this area of his brain
has been damaged, you can see if you look from another side, his right hemisphere, this
is what it should have looked like.
So what is the effect of that?
He sees it as a child would see a word.
They can see the word.
They can see that the letters are there.
But it doesn’t make any sense to them.
So it seems what has happened with Terry is that he can see the word, but he can’t take
that visual information forward.
It’s been disconnected.
Is this then the brain’s reading center?
To find out, Cathy sought out other people who had developed reading problems after a
stroke.
Careful observations showed that their difficulties are intriguingly varied.
A patient might looked at a word yacht, and see ship.
So there’s no connection between the visual… in the word yacht and the word ship.
And then there are other patients still, who have a different strategy, they look at the
word yacht, and they would go: ya, cht, yea-chet, and they won’t ever guess it’s yacht.
And for them, they are successfully trying to sound things out, but they are never getting
into what the meaning of the words is.
When Cathy scanned the brains of these stroke patients, each with a subtly different reading
handicap, she discovered that many different bits of their brains had been damaged.
This suggested that reading involves more than one small part.
So a lot of areas of the brain are involved, and they are all integrated together, transform
visual information into auditory information, into motor information, then into meaning.
Of course when you read a word, you can do so in a few hundred milliseconds.
You have no idea how hard your brain is working.
So there’s no single reading center, but a highly complex network, a cerebral internet.
Cathy’s work laid bare an intricate reading kit-of-parts.
In tiny fractions of a second, the brain must decipher letters and connect them to sounds,
another part of the brain connect sounds and letters to meaning.
Yet another stream of signals fire up the parts of brain that control the movement of
our mouths and tongues even when we are reading silently.
If a single one of these connections are broken, as it is in Terry’s brain, the system gets
jammed.
You may see letters, but not a word, or read a word but not know what it means.
And what is just as remarkable is that every part of our reading kit was originally designed
to do something else.
There are no areas of the brain that are only responsible to reading.
So all the areas that are reading, are also involved in recognizing objects, in speaking,
so in order to read, it’s the connections between the visual inputs and the component
sounds that need to be linked together.
So this doesn’t involve any new brain regions, what it involves is a stronger and more efficient
links.
So how do our brains grow this intricate reading circuits?
These children are about to embark on a remarkable journey.
The same one our ancestors took when they invented alphabets five thousand years ago.
And Terry has taken in reverse.
Their brain must learn how to break up a single word that they can hear into tiny building
blocks, and then link those sounds to the letters they see on the page, and finally
put it all back together again.
For these young brains, forging links between sound and alphabet is one of the biggest learning
changes they’ll ever face, and for new readers, one language is particularly tricky.
I think English is very tough to learn to be literate in, most of the world’s languages
have syllables like you might find in the word baby or coco, that’s just a consonant
sound and a vowel sound, a consonant sound and a vowel sound.
Where as in English, we have very complex syllables, we have syllables like stamp, or
break, or bridge, where you’ve got a lot of sounds in that single syllable.
So a child learning to be literate in English has to first of all represent that package
of sound very clearly, which is the phonological side.
And then they also have to learn which bits of those sound packages correspond to alphabetic
letters, when the letter-sound-correspondences keep varying.
But perhaps making them do that extra bit of work is also good for the brain?
Certainly.
And in these (kind of) brain image studies you can see that extra architecture is built
up by a brain learning to read English.
Quite what that means psychologically isn’t clear yet, but yes, the task is more complex,
and the brain responds by building up more complex systems in order to cope.
And as with other London cabbies, the more time we put into practicing, the stronger
the connections grow, and the better we get in reading.
We can make an analogy with your muscles that you might haven’t so many muscles, but a
bodybuilder will build up their muscles so that they are bigger than somebody who wasn’t
a bodybuilder.
And likewise, with the brain you can that when you become good at a particular skill,
you can actually see the brain structure changing and growing to accommodate this new skill.
And likewise when you give up on a skill, you can see the brain shrink back down again.
In another word, use it or lose it.
The reading brain is a precious thing, and keep it on top form, it must be maintained.
According to a professor of English literature here at Liverpool University, there’s no
more powerful way of doing that than tackling the masterpieces of our tough mother tongue.
And he’s looked to brain science to show why.