Brain power - you are what you read

- Thu, 20 Sep 2007

Reading - and what we read - actually changes the structure of our brain according to neuroscientist Maryanne Wolf .

"What the brain is doing is learning how to put together the networks that our brain already has, for vision, for language, for thinking, for feeling, for remembering, and making a whole new circuit of all those existing parts," she said, in a recent radio interview to promote her new book about these findings, "Proust and The Squid - The Story And Science of the Reading Brain."

In her book she argues that humans were never designed to read - there is no reading gene passed down from parent to child. And as humans have evolved, their brains have constantly been reconfigured to adapt to different reading styles.  A person in ancient Egypt who read hieroglyphic symbols would have quite a different brain configuration from that of a more modern person reading an alphabet, and still again from someone fluent in using electronic technology.

Appreciating how the brain has evolved and how our brain pathways work is an important step in learning how to protect our brain throughout our lives. Things like memory loss are avoidable by stimulating the pathways associated with memory and concentration. At Headstrong Cognitive, neuroscientists have designed brain games which directly target the memory pathways.  Being cognitively fit  has been found to delay normal age-related memory loss and contributes to the development of a brain reserve which protects against degenerative diseases like dementia and Alzheimer's.