The Unbelievable Science of How We Read

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Published 2022-02-15
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Reading. You’re doing it right now. I bet you don’t even have to think about it. But have you ever wondered what’s happening in your brain to turn all these weird symbols into meaning? This video will teach you how to read all over again. What you’re doing right now is way more amazing than you ever realized.

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All Comments (21)
  • @amylsmith
    As a graphic designer, in school, the biggest thing we were taught is that 90% of our work shouldn’t be noticed.
  • @juanma170394
    It would be very interesting to relate this with reading sheet music, music is a language and when you read sheet music there must be a lot going on in your brain, not only you have to understand the information about pitch and rythm, but your brain has to figure out the movements requiered to accurately produce the sounds through your instrument or your voice, all in real time without loosing a beat. When I was first studying sight reading I remember my teacher always telling us not to read note by note, you have to read whole phrases at once, because otherwise you would never have enough time to perform the music correctly. There must be some kind of musical "word superiority effect" going on, that allows us to read and perform sheet music.
  • @DragoNate
    7:00 "you're brain ISN'T sounding out the words as you read" mine does. and it's extremely distracting and frustrating. it is very, very difficult to turn it off or ignore it & doing so usually distracts me more. this is probably the biggest reason i read so slowly.
  • @genisay
    I think the reason we learn to read words initially by sounding them out is to give us the tools to aquire new words we are not already familiar with. This allows us to be able to independently add new words to our vocabulary through out life as we encounter them, since we learned a method to decode the word until we became familiar enough with it to recognize it at a glance.
  • @rimah5662
    This is so cool! When I read a book it’s usually a voice in my head reading it (but my thoughts are like that constantly). But when I get really into a book I’ll stop reading individual words and it turns into something like watching a movie in my head, seeing images rather than hearing words.
  • @AlexWalkerSmith
    I've always been noticably slower at reading than everyone else, because I read at about the same speed as I speak. I was in my late 20s when I learned that other people don't "say" every word in their head as they read. Whenever I'm watching something and text appears on-screen, I often struggle to read the entire thing before it disappears, and I spent my entire life wondering why they make it disappear so fast. It was when I told someone about this grievance that I learned that other people don't read "out loud" in their mind. I've tried learning how to scan a sentence the way other people describe, but no luck. I think my brain might be cemented like this. If only I'd have discovered this when I was a developing kid in school.
  • @MaxPower-11
    You definitely read whole words rather than individual letters. In fact, your brain is so good at it that as long as you keep the correct starting and ending letters of a word and repeating letters (i.e., the same sound) together you can scramble the inner letters of a word but still be able to fairly easily decipher the correct word. For example, can you guess what this says: I LKIE ADOACVO. IT IS GEERN AND TSTAY.
  • @Lampe2020
    Absolutely fascinating XD I even noticed that when I'm reading a well-written story I don't conciously see any writing, I just see the story in my "Kopfkino" (as an imagined movie).
  • @scotttandy1161
    I used to work in a care home for elderly patients, and there was a 92 year old lady with late stage dementia, should could barely formulate a sentence…yet she could still read! You’d give her a letter that had come for her in the post and she’d read it all aloud. It’s very deeply embedded into us
  • I’m dyslexic and when you mentioned the part that we “don’t sound out words in our heads when we read” that is exactly what I do, I always wondered why other people find they can read faster in their head than out loud because for me it’s exactly the same.
  • I thought he would at least touch on the fact that the human brain can recognize words in a sentence even when some of the letters are scrambled almost as quickly as when they aren’t scrambled.
  • @sander_bouwhuis
    99.9% of the videos on Youtube are pretty bad... and then once in a while you encounter a video as good as this. Thank you VERY much for your calm demeanor and very informative content. I subscribed to you.
  • @TheSwauzz
    I've realized this phenomenon while reading. During intense parts of the story, I'll "skim ahead" to get to the point faster and then go back and read regularly to before that part. Well.. it always turns out that I DID read and process nearly all the words and I just waste time reading them again. It's pretty interesting!
  • @MrsRobinNL
    I wish they would've touched on the subject of Dyslexia and how that affects someone's way of reading compared to what they described. Also, I wonder how it works with languages that have different symbols and if they're learned and read in a similar way.
  • @izy5199
    Why do words look weird the longer you look at it?
  • @태이씨
    I experienced it again when I learned to read the Korean alphabet. My brain struggled to recognize full words right away, and I still read it slower than Latin letters. Yet I am absolutely in love with the letters and their shapes in Hangeul.
  • @Speciimenn
    "next time you pick up a book you wont even think about this, you'll just enjoy a good story." BOLD OF U TO ASSUME I DONT OVERTHINK EVERYTHING, JOE
  • @rickseiden1
    I always read the words out loud in my head. I'm one of those people who has the non-stop internal monologue going, and it doesn't stop when I'm reading.
  • @exzartwork
    I am from Indonesia and we write with the same alphabet as English, but when I read, I notice in my native language, I read something in the visualization of what I think... I describe words in a real shape as a picture. It's so different when I read in English, I was so good when I read movie subtitles because I see the picture, but when I read a book, my mind reads it as a 'word'. I was sometimes frustrated why my head can't do the same when I read in Indonesian words. I notice this when I read english novels. Maybe it's because I am still learning English, but it's so weird how my brain works differently just by the language I use
  • When you add in that we can recognize a word even if it's misspelled (often without even realizing it's misspelled) and we can breeze over double words or missing ones (particularly connectors), the layers of pattern matching and context extrapolation is even more fascinating. Loved the presentation!