Don’t Feel Bad If You Aren’t a Good Reader

Reading is unnatural and I learned that recently. Basically, our brains and body have evolved over time to naturally developed verbal speech. We have been using verbal communication for possibly 27 million years. During that time our brains got better at learning and properly using verbal speech to the point where it comes naturally to us.

On the other hand, handwritten communication hasn’t been around for as long as verbal communication so it doesn’t come as easy to us at all. It’s unnatural. Our brain learns written communication by memorizing patterns and shapes. That’s all letters and words really are but they convey so much and because of that reading is actually a complex skill. It takes three areas of the brain, in the Broca’s area, the inferior frontal gyrus and the insular, to read one word. Reading one sentence or more requires your entire brain. It’s really trippy to me. I had no idea that it took that much brainpower to read I took this design class that I’m writing this blog post for. I had a project too! It’s pretty neat. So, there is this elephant.

“As a complex skill, reading involves all of the regions of the brain, because it involves all cognitive functioning of humans — verbal and non-verbal — such as attention, planning, abstract reasoning, predicting, inhibition, use of strategies, problem solving, working memory, and long-term storage memory and retrieval of vocabulary and concepts, the procedural skill of retrieval, the use of grammatical knowledge, and the motor mechanism for visual processing, and production.” -Neurobiology Research Findings: How the Brain Works During Reading by Siusana Kweldju

So, there is this elephant.

I had to make a design based on this theory but it took a lot of research to get there. I first read up on how the brain works in textbooks I found online and looked up a bunch of optical illusions and how they worked. Based on what I learned, conducting a survey, and also kids tv shows I created this.

Reading is recognizing patterns and shapes in your brain. When letters are shown to you in a way that you are unfamiliar with that’s when it gets a little less easy to read. That is why you saw the picture of the elephant before you saw the word elephant inside it (assuming that you see the word by now). If not, here is some help.

It took a lot of drawing on top of an elephant and a few hours of free time to get there but I think it’s a decent representation of what I learned.

So, don’t feel bad if you aren’t a good reader. It’s a lot more complex than we think and requires a lot of brainpower and a lot of learning. It doesn’t come as easy to some people and that is okay.