The Magical Art of Magnetic Resonance Imaging to Study the Reading Brain

Abstract

Introduction Do you like to read? Have you read the Harry Potter books? Reading is an ability that is learned through instruction (e.g., a teacher or parent teaching you) and needs much practice at home or in school. Many different things help us become great readers. As we grow up, we have many experiences, and our bodies, our thinking, our feelings, and the environment around us are always changing. Early in life, we learn the easier skills, like understanding the meaning of certain sounds, recognising faces, or walking. In fact, learning starts even before we are born! As we grow, we learn more complex skills, like speaking words and sentences, reading, and how to interact with others. Learning new skills goes hand-in-hand with the development of the brain. But many different things can affect how we develop, including changes in our environments, our learning experiences, or even our DNA, which is the biological information that our parents pass on to us. This is also true for reading. Reading is an ability that we practise for a long time before we become good at it. But this practice starts long before we pick up our first book or go to school. Before we are even born, we start listening to sounds and hearing basic parts of language. These experiences shape areas of the brain that later help us to develop reading skills. In 1983, a professor named Jeanne Chall said that learning to read happens in several stages (Figure 1). Today we know that many different factors can affect these reading stages and that learning to read can differ among individual children and across the globe. Such differences exist because many things can affect reading development, like where we grow up, which language we speak, the vocabulary of our language, our ability to play games with speech sounds (e.g., say "banana" without saying the sound /b/), and how good we are at understanding stories.