Learning to read rewires your brain and makes you worse at recognizing faces
RichardMCNgo · x · 2026-11-09
Richard Ngo shares a striking neuroscience finding: learning to read thickens the corpus callosum, modifies Broca's area and the prefrontal cortex, and repurposes visual cortex for letter recognition — making people measurably worse at facial recognition. A brain scan alone could reveal whether a stranger knows how to read.
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