Brain and reading who feeds whom?

I recently read an article on neuroscience, focused on the power that books have on human behavior, the arguments expressed seemed interesting to me, mainly because reading is undoubtedly the greatest invention of the human species.

One of the things that caught my attention is that, according to neuroscience specialists, there is no genetic program for learning to read, basically because our learning system is adaptive, and therefore, its processes adapt to the environment.

The classic example to support the above is that if a child, anywhere in the world, is in a speaking environment, his language will naturally be activated, but this does not occur with reading, since it implies the acquisition of a complete symbolic code, both visual and verbal.

It is assured that reading is an acquired set of skills that literally changes our brain, therefore, it is intuitive who feeds the brain because books are made of efficient codes that we acquire by reading, and this makes us remember most of the cases, and at the same time we store them in the form of knowledge.

This stored knowledge is then used by our brain as a guide to carry out activities that provide us with the tools to survive in situations that threaten our existence.

In this sense, it is clear that reading is an acquired set of skills that literally feeds the brain by supplying it with new connections between visual, language, thought and emotion regions.

I invite you to take advantage of the books or small libraries we have at home, to feed our brain, and thus strengthen our creativity, intelligence and empathy.

➊ Nicole Landi Neurobiological bases of reading comprehension: Insights from neuroimaging studies of word level and text level processing in skilled and impaired readers. Link

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