Busily erasing social skills? (Image: Gary John Norman/Getty)

Have you ever been embarrassed by introducing yourself at a party to someone only for them to point out that you’ve met before? Don’t feel too bad: your superior reading skills may be to blame, according to a new brain-scan study.

Stanislas Dehaene at the INSERM-CEA Cognitive Neuroimaging Unit in Saclay, France, has previously proposed a “neuronal recycling” theory, which suggests that new skills are handled by existing brain-cell circuits with older but related functions.

To test the hypothesis Dehaene and colleagues carried out functional MRI brain scans on 10 people who could not read, 22 who learned to read as adults and 31 who did so as children, while they were shown text and images.


The scans firstly confirmed which regions of the brain are associated with reading: as expected, the visual word form area, which is known to enable people to link sounds with written symbols, became active during reading, demonstrating that it plays an important role. Unsurprisingly, those who were better readers had more activation in this area when they were reading compared with the others. And when volunteers listened to spoken sentences, all their brains showed similar responses in the visual word form area.

Faced down

But when the researchers showed participants pictures of faces, the visual word form area of those who could read was much less active than that of participants who could not read. So, the researchers speculate, learning to read competes with face recognition ability – in this part of the brain at least.

“The intriguing possibility that our face-perception abilities suffer in proportion to our reading skills will be explored in future research,” they say.

Dehaene has previously speculated that the ability to read may have hijacked a neuronal network that evolved to enable us to visually track animals.

Last year, Manuel Carreiras at the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastián, Spain, found that the brains of adults who learned to read as adults were structurally different to those who could not read.

Carreiras describes Dehaene’s findings as “remarkable”. “The hypothesis suggests that this brain area has not evolved for reading but results from a reconfiguration of evolutionarily older brain circuits dedicated to object processing,” he says.

Journal reference: Science, DOI: 10.1126/science.1194140