Reading

Reading is a specific form of perception and one which is exclusive to humans.

While we may be genetically inclined to be drawn to faces and to listen to speech, there is no similar innate tendency to attend to written material. There is no dedicated brain region, in part because writing is a relatively recent (5-6,000 year old) technology.

Instead, reading is acquired only through instruction - letters and then words and sentences must be identified and remembered, and these memories need to be drawn on to then recognize and read further writing.

The visual word form area (VWFA) is a functional region of the left fusiform gyrus and surrounding cortex (right-hand side being part of the fusiform face area) that is hypothesized to be involved in identifying words and letters from lower-level shape images, prior to association with phonology or semantics.

Writing is a delineated subset of the objects that we encounter in the world. Hofstadter argues in many places, especially Ambigrammia, that the definitions of letters are very blurry, and that the surrounding context allows us to identify letters as parts of words and phrases even when those letters are greatly deformed:

"Is that first shape really a "D"? Is the final shape really an "E"? Such questions make it sound as if precise scientific determination is called for, but category membership is blurry and is influenced by context, and the nearby letters (or nearby shapes, to use a more neutral term) form a context in which each of these four shapes is perceived. Even if each shape taken in isolation is a somewhat shaky member of its intended alphabetic category, it's a different ballgame when all four are placed side by side, since now, the shaky alphabetic suggestion made by each one, supplemented by the prior existence of the familiar name "DAVE" results in each questionable part reinforcing all the other questionable parts, and the overall upshot is, mirabile dictu, a strong member of the higher-level "DAVE" category."

Reading is a particular form of perception. Your brain is either primed to read by the action of opening a book or turning to a sign, or is surprised to encounter letters and words and switches from its previous context or form of attention, into a reading context.

For Western readers, reading is a form of perception that moves in a specific, controlled manner, from left to right along the written page and then jumping to the start of the next line.