How reading shapes and enhances our cognitive activity

“One of the most powerful cognitive enhancers, with broad and increasingly well-documented effects, is rarely emphasized in these discussions: the ability to read,” he says. An unexpected finding: Reading and face recognition One of the more surprising threads in the book concerns face recognition. A long-standing idea in cognitive neuroscience holds that because reading is a relatively recent cultural invention, the brain has no dedicated reading network of its own, so literacy training has to borrow space from older visual systems, including the one used for recognizing faces. How reading shapes and enhances our cognitive activity Reading and cognitive activity have been mentioned before here. This goes a little farther with the face recognition angle. Want to be a better reader? Here’s how to practice active reading Some 2,000 years later, under very different circumstances, the darkness is gathering again. Americans, once members of a proudly literate society, read much less than…