![]() ![]() Yet it performs highly sophisticated operations that are indispensable to fluent reading. 4 Its efficiency is so great that it even responds to words that we fail to recognize consciously-words made subliminal by flashing them for a fraction of a second. The letterbox responds to written words more than it does to most other categories of visual stimuli, including pictures of faces, objects, houses, and even Arabic numerals. Indeed, this site is amazingly specialized. And, if it is destroyed or disconnected, as in the patient whose brain scan is shown at right, we may selectively lose the capacity to read.Įxperts call this region the visual word form area, but in a recent book for the general public, 3 I dubbed it the “brain’s letterbox,” because it concentrates much of our visual knowledge of letters and their configurations. In all of us, it is systematically located at the same place within a “mosaic” of ventral preferences for various categories of objects. It shows a stronger activation to words than to many other categories of visual stimuli, such as pictures of objects, faces, or places. ![]() 2 Figure 1. The visual word form area-the brain’s letterbox-is a small region of the human visual system that systematically activates whenever we read. Written words never fail to activate a small region at the base of the left hemisphere, always at the same place, give or take a few millimeters. ![]() A brief localizer scan, during which images of brain activity are collected as a person responds to written words, faces, objects, and other visual stimuli, serves to identify this region. 1 In particular, a small region of the visual cortex becomes active with remarkable reproducibility in the brains of all readers (see figure 1). Whenever we read-whether our language is Japanese, Hebrew, English, or Italian-each of us relies on very similar brain networks. Although I find the diversity of the world’s writing systems bewildering, there is a striking regularity that remains hidden. ![]()
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