Science Daily reports:

Humans have an uncanny ability to skim through text, instantly recognizing words by their shape–even though writing developed only about 6000 years ago–long after humans evolved. Thus, neuroscientists have hotly debated whether an area of the cortex called the Visual Word Form Area (VWFA) is truly a specific and necessary area for recognizing words.

A epilepsy patient’s recent brain surgery disrupted VWFA function.  Now the patient is unable to recognise whole words, but must read them letter by letter.  This appears to confirm that the VWFA serves the sole and specific function of word recognition.  MRI scans have shown that it is active only in reading; it is inactive in recognition of faces and objects.  The researchers found that “our patient presented a clear-cut reading impairment following surgery, while his performance remained flawless in object recognition and naming, face processing, and general language abilities”.

This raises a very interesting question: Why is there a piece of tissue in the brain dedicated to the task of word recognition when that skill has only been needed for the past 6000 years?

 via Faith-Science News at The American Scientific Affiliation.