Letters, syllables, words and sentences--spatially arranged sets of symbols that acquire meaning when we read them. But is there an area and cognitive mechanism in our brain that is specifically devoted to reading? Probably not; written language is too much of a recent invention for the brain to have developed structures specifically dedicated to it. According to a new paper published in Current Biology , underlying reading there is evolutionarily ancient function that is more generally used to process many other visual stimuli.
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