Your Brain Was Never Built to Read — So How Do You Do It?
Humans have spoken for a very long time and read for a very short one. Learning to read rewires a part of the brain meant for something else.
Children learn to speak without lessons. Put a baby among talking people and speech arrives on its own. Reading is nothing like that. Reading has to be taught, every time, to every person — and that is a clue about what is going on inside your head.
Borrowed machinery
Writing is only a few thousand years old, which is far too recent for our brains to have evolved a dedicated reading part. Instead, learning to read takes over a region that was already good at recognising shapes and objects, and retrains it to recognise letters and words instantly.
That is why a fluent reader cannot look at a familiar word and not read it. The recognition has become automatic.
Speaking is something humans grew into. Reading is something every reader builds.