I learned to read when my older sisters came home from elementary school and practiced with our family. I remember sitting on my mom's left side, running my fingers over pictures of ladybugs and little golden dogs, while my sister sat on her right side and read the story out loud. She could read more words than I could, but I was getting there. When I was 9, I hid books under my bed and pulled them out in the middle of the night to read one more chapter. When I was 18, I was packing for college and wondering what to do with an overflowing floor-to-ceiling shelf. Everything I read became part of my identity, and everything I could keep (or steal) became a member of a vast crowd of voices that eventually converged into my own.
When you look at the key features of a civilization, most historians agree that a group of people had to establish a writing system in order to be "civilized." Reading makes us human.
But what if I told you that people were never supposed to read?
There is no specific area in the brain that should read; this is why children must learn to read, and why some people learn more easily than others. Each time the reader begins a new story, they are using a system that is brand new and generational. As humans have evolved, our brains have learned to combine the use of multiple areas and a process called neuronal recycling to "reuse" the skills we already have. It's a miracle.
Reading a new book, learning a new language, and even speaking your own language to communicate with friends and loved ones are the results of a multifaceted living system. Discovering that reading and writing doesn't come naturally has changed the way I read my favorite books. As a writer, I can be more patient when I know where my brain has gone, so I have a chance to write anything at all. As a reader, I appreciate every word all the more knowing that it has gone through countless geographies and definitions so that it can capture that exact place in one particular sentence.
The reading list below is a selection of works that further explain how we got to where we are today—in an age where literacy is not only considered an essential skill, but also an outlet for escapism, obsession, and self-expression. Spoiler alert: This process isn't over yet. As long as we read and write, our brains and our language influence each other and adapt to the literary climate. It is our gift not only to learn how this process takes place, but also to take advantage of the positive changes it could bring to us and our society.
But what happens to your brain when you're not one to sit and read novels? Even though understanding, interpreting and speaking language is a natural part of our brain, something magical still happens when we learn to speak a new language. Saga Briggs writes about how people who have recently learned a language show increased activity in the parts of their brains responsible for auditory processing, memory and grammatical understanding. Here, Briggs describes the process step by step: what happens to your brain when you learn a new language, how we measure language learning, and what this means for new language learners. Learning a new language takes the fear out of us and helps us monolinguals appreciate how amazing it is that we already know one language.
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