THIS ARTICLE IS HERE republished from Conversation under a Creative Commons License.
The number of people who read for pleasure seems to be steadily failing. According to the data, fifty percent of adults in the UK do not read regularly (up from 42 percent in 2015), and almost one in four adolescent people aged 16 to 24 say they have never read. research conducted by The Reading Agency.
But what are the consequences? Will people’s preference for video over text impact our brains or our evolution as a species? What brain structure do good readers actually have? My new studypublished in NeuroImage, discovered.
I analyzed open source data from over 1,000 participants and found that readers of different abilities have different features of brain anatomy.
The structure of two key areas of the left hemisphere for language was different in good readers.
One of them was the anterior part of the temporal lobe. The left temporal pole helps you associate and categorize different types of meaningful information. To gather the meaning of a word such as legthis area of the brain associates visual, sensory and motor information showing how legs look, feel and move.
The second was Heschl’s gyrus, a fold in the superior temporal lobe that houses the auditory cortex (the cortex is the outermost layer of the brain). Better reading skills have been linked to a larger anterior temporal lobe in the left hemisphere compared to the right. It makes sense that having a larger area of the brain responsible for meaning makes it easier to understand words and, therefore, to read.
It may seem less intuitive that the auditory cortex is related to reading. Isn’t reading primarily a visual skill? Not only that. To associate letters with speech sounds, we first need to know the sounds of the language. This phonological awareness Is well-established precursor on children’s reading development.
A thinner left Heschl’s gyrus has previously been associated with dyslexia, which is associated with serious reading difficulties. My research shows that this difference in cortical thickness does not draw a straight line between people with and without dyslexia. Instead, it covers a larger population in which a thicker auditory cortex correlates with better reading skills.
Why size matters
Is thicker always better? In terms of cortical structure, no, not necessarily. We know that in most people, the auditory cortex has more myelin in the left hemisphere. Myelin is a fatty substance that acts as an insulator for nerve fibers. It increases the speed of neural communication and can also isolate columns of brain cells from each other. Neural columns they are believed to work as petite processing units.
Their increased isolation and rapid communication in the left hemisphere may be thought to enable the rapid, categorical processing necessary for language. We need to know whether the speaker is using a given category D Or T when you speak Dear Or tear rather than detecting the exact point at which the vocal folds begin to vibrate.