THIS ARTICLE IS rererented from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license.
The number of people who read for fun ecombines to be steadily dropping. Fifty percent of UK matures say they don’t read standardly (up from 42 percent in 2015) and almost one in four lesser people aged 16 to 24 say they’ve never been readers, according to research by The Reading Agency.
But what are the implications? Will people’s pickence for video over text impact our brains or our evolution as a species? What benevolent of brain arrange do excellent readers actupartner have? My novel study, rerented in NeuroImage, has set up out.
I checkd uncover source data from more than 1,000 participants to find that readers of varying abilities had separateent traits in brain anatomy.
The arrange of two regions in the left hemisphere, which are transport inant for language, were separateent in people who were excellent at reading.
One was the anterior part of the temporal lobe. The left temporal pole helps associate and sort separateent types of unbenevolentingful directation. To assemble the unbenevolenting of a word such as leg, this brain region associates the visual, sensory and motor directation conveying how legs see, sense and relocate.
The other was Heschl’s gyrus, a fanciaccess on the upper temporal lobe which arranges the auditory cortex (the cortex is the outermost layer of the brain). Better reading ability was joined to a huger anterior part of the temporal lobe in the left hemisphere contrastd to the right. It creates sense that having a huger brain area pledgeted to unbenevolenting creates it easier to comprehfinish words and, therefore, to read.
What might seem less perceptive is that the auditory cortex would be rcontent to reading. Isn’t reading mainly a visual sfinish? Not only. To pair letters with speech sounds, we first insist to be conscious of the sounds of the language. This phonoreasonable consciousness is a well-set uped precursor to children’s reading enhugement.
A slfinisherner left Heschl’s gyrus has previously been rcontent to dyslexia, which comprises cut offe reading difficulties. My research shows that this variation in cortical denseness does not draw a basic dividing line between people with or without dyslexia. Instead, it spans the huger population, in which a denseer auditory cortex correpostpoinsists with more adept reading.
Why Size Matters
Is denseer always better? When it comes to cortical arrange, no, not necessarily. We understand the auditory cortex has more myelin in the left hemisphere of most people. Myelin is a overweightty substance that acts as an insulator for nerve fibers. It increases neural communication speed and can also insupostpoinsist columns of brain cells from each other. Neural columns are thinkd to function as minuscule processing units.
Their increased isolation and rapid communication in the left hemisphere can be thought to help the quick, categorical processing essential for language. We insist to understand if a speaker employs the catebloody d or t when saying dear or tear rather than recognizeing the exact point where the vocal fanciaccesss begin vibrating.
