How does the brain work while we read? Reading is a very stimulating activity for the brain and brings many short- and long-term benefits, such as reducing stress, improving sleep quality, increasing our vocabulary and memory, and is also linked to increased intelligence, however few are aware of the mechanisms that are activated in the brain during reading.
In general, reading is seen as a process of decoding spellings that ultimately leads to meaning, from the point of view of research, it is interesting to know all the small processes that occur at the same time, so that all the steps can be identified and identified. helps people with learning issues.
- Until recently it was really difficult to discover in real time what processes occurred in the brain during reading.
- Now thanks to functional MRI and other techniques.
- Neuroscience allows us to see brain activity during a task.
More generally, neuroscience wants to know the relationship between reading and cognition, emotion, learning and cognitive performance.
When we find a printed word, in just 400 milliseconds, the back left area of the brain is activated, where there are areas of spelling and phonological coding, if we already know the word, morphological, syntactic and semantic identification occurs immediately.
Morphological recognition is the most basic process by which, thanks to the activation of the left frontal areas of the brain, we recognize the letters that make up the word and identify it.
On the other hand, syntactic recognition allows us to identify if it is a noun or a verb and if it refers to the past, present or future. In this way, relationships between words are created or recognized.
These processes occur in different areas of the brain, in parallel and interconnected, taking into account the process described above, when we see a word, the visual cortex is activated and transferred to the angular convolution.
At this point, it becomes a phonetic representation that is sent to the anterior fusiform convolution, moving to the temporal and frontal regions, such as the Wernicke region, where the meaning and understanding of the words can be accessed.
At this time, information on the meaning and morphological identification is in the lower anterior frontal convolution to be integrated.
Once the words are understood, it is time to analyze the semantic and syntactic relationships between them. For example, the order in which words, verbal times, add-ons, information about the topic are saved?
This syntactic processing appears to occur in the anterior and left front temporal lobes. Then move on to the lower left turn for thematic and syntactic processing, more related to subject-verb interaction, as well as to evaluate the semantic intent of the entire sentence.
At the same time, mechanisms are created to detect inconsistencies or novelty effects related to the lower frontal cortex, in this case when we read inconsistent sentences there is greater activation of this area than when we read something consistent.
Understanding what we read is also linked to memory, because to access broader meanings we use our experiences, for example, certain temporal regions of the brain are activated especially when we read information related to people and tools.
In this sense, a group of researchers from South Carolina and California found in a study on functional MRI that words evoke connections to the real world, that is, they activate areas in the same way as lived experiences.
An example is that words with a meaning related to something manipulable have caused the activation of areas related to the planning and execution of tasks, or the motor areas involved.
Emotions are the result of a brain process located mainly in the limbic system, in this area is the hypothalamus, a region of the brain very involved in memory and learning, so emotion is a fundamental process for the consolidation of new information.
In addition, the emotion when reading activates the attention networks. In fact, there are specific mechanisms for the emotional lexicon.
It has been observed that reading emotionally charged words, such as erotic or rude words, increases the person’s time versus neutral ones, so emotionally stimulating stories are also useful for activating networks of motivation and attention.
In this sense, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior dorsal cingulate cortex are activated as we read, as the processes of attention, planning, association and monitoring of information begin.
Finally, the prefrontal cortex is activated to integrate all the information, while the anterior code remains attentive and focused on what is still read literally.
“A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies, who never reads a single life?. – George R. R. Martin-
The stimulation that occurs in the brain during reading is very important, it activates many regions at almost the same time, which is a long-term advantage, improving the quantity and quality of connections.
In addition, neuroscience has shown that reading makes you live longer (at least the brain) and leads to the processing of emotions, making you smarter emotionally.