This is your brain on reading

by: Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn

What strange and splendid alchemy is this, that allows me to coax shapes together—shapes essentially random—and for you to see them not as impenetrable symbols, but ideas and pictures, to hear sounds? It’s reading, and it’s so rote for many adults that we’ve forgotten how miraculous a mental feat it actually is. A new book by Stanislas Dehaene (whom we profiled in 2008), however, called "Reading in the Brain: The Science and Evolution of a Human Invention," restores some sense of awe to the endeavor. In a Barnes & Noble review of Dehaene, Jonah Lehrer dissects the way reading really works:

"Although our eyes are focused on the letters, we quickly learn to ignore them. Instead, we perceive whole words, chunks of meaning. (The irregularities of English require such flexibility. As George Bernard Shaw once pointed out, the word "fish" could also be spelled ghoti, assuming that we used the gh from "enough," the o from "women," and the ti from "lotion.") In fact, once we become proficient at reading, the precise shape of the letters—not to mention the arbitrariness of the spelling—doesn't even matter, which is why we read word, WORD, and WoRd the same way."

This reminds me of a 2005 New Yorker profile on typeface designer Matthew Carter, in which Alec Wilkinson quoted typographer Beatrice Warde saying that type should erect “a window between the reader inside the room and that landscape which is the author's words.” The reader's mental eye should focus “through type and not upon it.” When looked at like that, reading approaches telepathy: it is as if your eyes saw right through these words, through skin and skull, and into the imaginative life of my brain.

from: New Yorker