Wired to Read

    Inspired by Dr. Leinwand’s paper on “Maturation of neural activity and associative learning,” curious inquiries into the spontaneous brain activity in adult and maturing brains were made. 

    It was found that human brains have active regions to exclusively recognize words and letters, present from birth. The study conducted by the Ohio State University had shown that the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA), a region functionally connected to the language-making part of the brain, is present and active in newborn brains. It was vaguely assumed that the VWFA was no different than the other visual recognition regions in the brain, with no distinct function to see words and letters only. Imaging of newborn brains showed that VWFA is active at the time of birth, meaning a baby is able to see words from mere objects before the baby is exposed to words.

    If we are born with the ability to read, the next step is to learn how to make use of the ability. There were assumptions about how learning to read may take up the brain’s overall capacity and therefore weaken the other visual recognition systems such as an object or face identification. However, in 2019 study by Hervais-Adelman et al., showed that reading is not going to hurt the category-selective areas. In contrast, reading could enhance visual brain response to letters and words and beyond. 

    Contemplating about our ability as humans as opposed to that of other animals, it is interesting how reading is exclusive to us if we say the skill itself had developed only recently, following the invention of writing systems. To back up this idea, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study from 2020 shows that Inferior Temporal (IT) cortex had potentially been ‘recycled’ to form the region specialized for reading. 

    There are still many questions, though, to find the answer to. One of them is finding out the reason for our brains to develop a certain specialization. Also, it is unclear when and how exactly the VWFA gets refined into maturation. Learning about the VWFA and its function in newborns can tell us more about reading and literacy stages. We can also connect language acquisition, possibly finding out if bilingual infants learn to distinguish between different sets of alphabets. 

References

1. Leinwand, Sarah G., and Kristin Scott. “Juvenile Hormone Drives the Maturation of Spontaneous Mushroom Body Neural Activity and Learned Behavior.” Neuron, vol. 109, no. 11, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.04.006.
2. Ohio State University. "Humans are born with brains 'prewired' to see words: Study finds connections to language areas of the brain." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 22 October 2020. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/10/201022125525.htm>.
3. Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. "Learning to read boosts the visual brain." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 18 September 2019. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2019/09/190918140743.htm>.
4. Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "Key brain region was 'recycled' as humans developed the ability to read: Part of the visual cortex dedicated to recognizing objects appears predisposed to identifying words and letters, a study finds." ScienceDaily. ScienceDaily, 4 August 2020. <www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200804134734.htm>.