Good for Reading? Your Brain Can Be Made Differently

THIS IS reprinted from Discussion under a Creative Commons license.

The number of people who read for pleasure seems to be on the decline. Fifty per cent of UK people say they don’t read regularly (up from 42 per cent in 2015) and almost one in four young people aged 16 to 24 say they have never read, according to research by The Reading Agency.

But what are the consequences? Can people’s preferences for video over text affect our brains or our evolution as a species? What type of brain do good readers have? Mrs a new lessonpublished in NeuroImage, has found.

I analyzed open data from more than 1,000 participants to find that readers of different abilities had different characteristics in the structure of the brain.

The structure of the two left hemispheres, which are important for language, was different for literate people.

One was the front part of the temporal lobe. The left side helps organize and categorize different types of logical information. Collecting the meaning of words like legThis area of ​​the brain integrates visual, sensory and motor functions depending on how the legs look, feel and move.

The other was Heschl’s gyrus, a fold in the upper temporal lobe that houses the cortex (the cortex is the outermost part of the brain). Better reading was associated with a larger frontal temporal lobe area in the left hemisphere compared to the right. It stands to reason that having a large part of the brain dedicated to meaning makes words easier to understand and, therefore, read.

What may seem less likely is that the auditory cortex may be associated with reading. Isn’t reading really a visual skill? Not only. In order to combine letters and words, we must first know the sound of the language. This word knowledge and a well established predecessor to children’s literacy development.

An atrophy of the left Heschl’s gyrus has been associated with dyslexia, which includes severe reading difficulties. My research shows that differences in cortical thickness do not draw a simple dividing line between people with and without dyslexia. Instead, it reaches more people, the more the cortex connects and reads more efficiently.

Why Is Growth Important?

Is thickness always good? When it comes to cortical structures, no, not really. We know that the auditory cortex has more myelin on the left side in most people. Myelin is a fatty substance that acts as an insulator for nerve fibers. It increases the speed of neural communication and can also block brain cells from each other. Neural columns they believe it works such as small processing units.

Their increased isolation and rapid left-hand communication can be thought to contribute to a faster, more efficient language. We need to know if the speaker uses the group d or t when he says beloved or tears instead of identifying the exact place where the vocal cords begin to vibrate.