Around 86% of the world’s population can read today, according to UNESCO. That’s billions of people who’ve mastered one of the most important skills humans can learn.
But as the posts in “Please Stroke, I’m Having A Help” prove, being able to read doesn’t always mean what you’re reading will make any sense.
And in this case, that’s the whole point. These linguistic disasters are meant to make you laugh, while reading itself remains the tool we rely on to understand everything else in daily life.
Learning to read is actually a pretty interesting process. Unlike spoken language, which humans naturally develop, reading has to be explicitly taught. Our brains weren’t designed for it.
You could give a toddler a stack of books and they’d never figure out how to read them without instruction. But once we learn, it becomes remarkably fast. According to research published in the Journal of Neuroscience, the brain can begin processing written words within 100 milliseconds of seeing them, faster than it takes to blink.
The brain does this through a region called the Visual Word Form Area, located in the left hemisphere. This tiny patch of neurons becomes specialized for recognizing written words and letter combinations.
Before we learn to read, this area is typically used for recognizing faces and objects. Reading fundamentally changes how this part of our brain functions.
What makes reading even more impressive is how efficiently our brains process words. According to research in cognitive psychology, we recognize letters within a word largely in parallel rather than reading letter by letter.
Studies have shown that we’re actually better at identifying letters when they appear in words compared to when we see them in isolation. This is called the Word Superiority Effect, and it helps explain why skilled readers can process text so quickly.
This is also why typos are so hard to spot in our own writing. Our brain is incredibly good at autocorrecting based on context and prediction. We see what we expect to see rather than what’s actually there.
In an interview with Wired, Dr. Tom Stafford explains that proofreading is difficult because our brain treats reading as a high-level task focused on meaning, not individual letters.
Reading also changes how we think. Studies have shown that literate people process information differently than non-literate people, even when the task has nothing to do with reading.
A 2017 study in Science Advances found that learning to read reorganizes brain connectivity patterns, affecting how we process spoken language and even visual information.
Despite how automatic reading feels for most of us, it takes years to master. Think of the time it takes children to become truly fluent readers. And even then, we continue refining our reading skills throughout our lives as we encounter new vocabulary, writing styles, and contexts.
In fact, research suggests vocabulary, a key part of strong reading comprehension, can keep growing well into later adulthood, often into the mid-60s.
