What Happens To Your Brain When You Read?

When you read, your brain is full of stimuli, as this activity offers many benefits in the short and long term. For example, it reduces stress, improves sleep quality, increases your vocabulary and memory, and it even leads to greater intelligence. However, few people know what is really going on in their brain when you read.

In general, reading is a process of decoding words that ultimately leads to meaning. From the point of view of research, it is interesting to know about all the small processes that take place at the same time. This is so that researchers can identify all the steps and help people with learning disabilities.

Until recently, it was difficult to determine what processes took place in a brain when a person read. Now neuroscience lets you see brain activity during a task. All thanks to functional magnetic resonance imaging and other techniques. In addition, neuroscience has an interest in sharing the relationship between reading and cognition, such as emotions, learning and cognitive performance,  more globally.

Your brain when you read – from words to meaning

It takes only 400 milliseconds before the brain is activated in the left posterior region after encountering a printed word. This is where the areas of spelling and phonological coding live. If you already know the word, morphological, syntactic and semantic identification occurs immediately.

Morphological recognition is the most basic process. Thanks to the activation of the left frontal areas of the brain, you can recognize the letters that form the word, and then identify it. Similarly, when it comes to syntactic recognition, you can recognize whether it is a name or a verb, and whether it refers to the past, present or future. Thus , your brain creates relationships between words to be able to recognize them later.

These processes take place in different areas of the brain, in a parallel and interconnected way. With respect to the process we described above, the visual cortex is activated when you see a word. It is then transmitted to the angular frequency.

At this point, it becomes a phonetic representation sent to the previous fusiform gyrus. After that, it is moved to the temporal and frontal areas, such as the Wernicke area, which is the access to meaning and understanding of the words. This is when you will find meaningful information and the morphological identification that the lower anterior frontal gyrus will integrate.

Text comprehension

Once you have understood the words you are reading, it is time to analyze the semantic and syntactic conditions. For example, the order the words have, grammatical time, the complements and information about the topic, etc.

This syntactic treatment appears to take place in the left frontal and anterior temporal lobe. It then moves to the lower left turn for thematic and syntactic treatment. This has more to do with the subject-verb interaction, in addition to evaluating the semantic intention with the complete sentence.

At the same time, the mechanisms that detect incongruence or news effects related to the subordinate frontal cortex occur. In this case, there is a higher activation of this area when you read inconsistent sentences than when you read something coherent.

Understanding what you read is also related to memory. To gain access to broader meanings, you need to get the experience. For example, some temporary regions of the brain are activated only when you read information related to people and tools.

In this connection, a research group from South Carolina and California found that words evoke connections with the real world in a study with functional magnetic resonance. That is, they activate areas in the same way as if they experienced them. An example is that words with a meaning related to something manipulable led to the activation of areas related to the planning and execution of tasks, or as involving motor areas.

Emotional and cognitive processing

Emotions are the result of a brain process that is mainly located in the limbic system. The hypothalamus is in this area. This area of ​​the brain is involved in memory and learning. Therefore, emotions are a fundamental process for consolidating all new information.

In addition, emotions activate when we read attention networks. There are, in fact, specific mechanisms for an emotional encyclopedia. Researchers observed that reading emotionally charged words, whether erotic or rude, leads to an increase in the time the reader spends, compared to neutral words. Therefore, emotionally stimulating stories are also useful for activating motivational and attentional networks.

In this connection, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the anterior dorsal cingulate cortex are activated while reading. In other words, you can start processes of attention, planning, association and monitoring of information.

Finally, the prefrontal cortex is activated to integrate all information, while the anterior cingulate remains attentive and focused on what you read more literally.

Your brain when you read

The stimulation that happens in your brain when you read is very high. This is because it activates many regions at about the same time, which is a long-term benefit that improves the quantity and quality of compounds.

In addition, neuroscience proved that reading allows you to experience more situations and train the treatment of your emotions, which also makes you emotionally smarter.