Study finds brain connections key to reading

A new study from MIT reveals that a brain region dedicated to reading has connections for that skill even before children learn to read. By scanning the brains of children before and after they learned to read, the researchers found that they could predict the precise location where each child's visual word form area (VWFA) would develop, based on the connections of that region to other parts of the brain. Neuroscientists have long wondered why the brain has a region exclusively dedicated to reading -- a skill that is unique to humans and only developed about 5,400 years ago, which is not enough time for evolution to have reshaped the brain for that specific task. The new study suggests that the VWFA, located in an area that receives visual input, has pre-existing connections to brain regions associated with language processing, making it ideally suited to become devoted to reading. "Long-range connections that allow this region to talk to other areas of the brain seem to drive function," says Zeynep Saygin, a postdoc at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research.