We were never meant to read

[David Morris]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2008/03/23/bowol123.xml

Reading, says Wolf, changed history. More than that, it changes the
brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes
us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a
page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the
human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you
fit the words together into sentences.

This takes an amazing amount of ultra-fast processing. Brains that do
this are different from brains that don't.

One important thing to bear in mind is that our brains did not evolve
to read. They evolved to hunt and gather, make campfires and so on.
This means that reading is an act of improvisation - when you read,
you're actually using parts of the brain that were designed to do
other things. You are, as it were, patching together several different
technologies.

That's why lots of people can't read very well - until very recently
in human history, the ability to read written language was not
adaptive; it conferred no advantages. But 50,000 years ago, on the
savannah or the steppes, the dyslexic brain might well have given its
possessor an edge.

When people started to read and write, it was not seen universally as
a good thing. On the contrary, some people, including Socrates,
thought it might be terribly damaging, in the same way that many
people today see computer games and text messages as damaging.