At this every moment, your brain is accomplishing an amazing feat -- reading. Tour eyes scan the page in short spasmodic movements. Four or five times per second, your gaze stops just long enough to recognize one or two words. You are, of course, unaware of this jerky intake of information. Only the sounds and meanings of the words reach your conscious mind. But how can a few black marks on white paper projected onto your retina evoke an entire universe,.....

The reader's brain contains a complicated set of mechanisms admirably attuned to reading. for a great many centuries, this talent remained a mystery. Today, the brain's black box is cracked open and a true science of reading is coming into being. Advances in psychology and neuroscience over the last twenty years have begun to unravel the principles underlying the brain's reading circuits. Modern brain imaging methods now reveal, in just a matter of minutes, the brain areas that activate when we decipher written words. Scientists can track a printed word as it progresses from the retina through a chain I call for a different "culture of neurons" -- a new way of looking at human cultural activities, based on understanding of how they map onto the brain networks that support them. Neuroscience's avowed goal is to describe how the elementary components of the nervous system lead to the behavioral regularities that can be observed in children and adults. Reading provides one of the most appropriate test beds of this "neurocultural" approach. We are increasingly aware of how writing system as different as Chinese, Hebrew, or English get inscribed in our brain circuits. In the case of reading, we can clearly draw direct links between our native neuronal architecture and our acquired cultural abilities -- but the hope is that this neuroscience approach will extend to other major domains of human cultural expression. ~ Page 3 / 4