In a  study pub­lished today in Sci­ence, func­tional mag­netic res­o­nance imag­ing (fMRI) was used to study the brains of 63 adults: 10 were illit­er­ate, 22 learned to read as adults, and 31  learned to read as chil­dren. Brain responses to spo­ken and writ­ten lan­guage, visual faces, houses, tools, and check­ers were examined.

The main dif­fer­ences found between lit­er­ate and illit­er­ate brains were:

1– The brains of all lit­er­ate adults showed more vig­or­ous responses to writ­ten words. This occurred in brain regions known to process visual information.

2– The brains of all lit­er­ate adults also showed enhanced activ­ity in left-temporal areas known to respond to spo­ken language.

2– The brain of illit­er­ate adults showed enhanced activ­ity in the left occipital-temporal  region of the brain known to respond to faces.

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What does it mean?

These results sug­gest that learn­ing to read changes the brain, not sur­pris­ingly, in the regions involved in vision and writ­ten lan­guage and, more sur­pris­ingly, in regions involved in oral lan­guage as well. These changes may hap­pen at some cost: The brains of lit­er­ate adults showed less response to faces than the brains of illit­er­ate adults. This may come from the fact that lit­er­ate brains have to share regions of the occipital-temporal cor­tex between words and faces. Whether this trans­lates into real behav­ioral dif­fer­ences is not know so far.

Inter­est­ingly, the changes hap­pened in the brain whether adults learned to read as chil­dren or much later. This is a great exam­ple of neu­ro­plas­tic­ity: Learn­ing can change the brain, at all ages.

Related arti­cle: Brain Plas­tic­ity: How learn­ing changes your brain

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