The act of reading is so easily taken for granted that we forget what an astounding feat it is. How can a few black marks on white paper evoke an entire universe of meanings? It's even more amazing when we consider that we read using a primate brain that evolved to serve an entirely different purpose. In this riveting investigation, Stanislas Dehaene explores every aspect of this human invention, from its origins to its neural underpinnings. A world authority on the subject, Dehaene reveals the hidden logic of spelling, describes pioneering research on how we process languages, and takes us into a new appreciation of the brain and its wondrous capacity to adapt."--Cover page [4].

Originally published: New York : Viking, 2009.

The new science of reading : From neurons to education ; Putting neurons into culture ; The mystery of the reading ape ; Biological unity and cultural diversity ; A reader's guide. How do we read? : The eye: a poor scanner ; The search for invariants ; Amplifying differences ; Every word is a tree ; The silent voice ; The limits of sound ; The hidden logic of our spelling system ; The impossible dream of transparent spelling ; Two routes for reading ; Mental dictionaries ; An assembly of daemons ; Parallel reading ; Active letter decoding ; Conspiracy and competition in reading ; From behavior to brain mechanisms. The brain's letterbox : Joseph-Jules Déjerine's discovery ; Pure Alexia ; A lesion revealed ; Modern lesion analysis ; Decoding the reading brain ; Reading is universal ; A patchwork of visual preferences ; How fast do we read? ; Electrodes in the brain ; Position invariance ; Subliminal reading ; How culture fashions the brain ; The brains of Chinese readers ; Japanese and its two scripts ; Beyond the letterbox ; Sound and meaning ; From spelling to sound ; Avenues to meaning ; A cerebral tidal bore ; Brain limits on cultural diversity ; Reading and evolution. The reading ape : Of monkeys and men ; Neurons of objects ; Grandmother cells ; An alphabet in the monkey brain ; Provo-letters ; The acquisition of shape ; The learning instinct ; Neuronal recycling ; Birth of a culture ; Neurons for reading ; Bigram neurons ; A neuronal word tree ; How many neurons for reading? ; Simulating the reader's cortex ; Cortical biases that shape reading. Inventing reading : The universal features of writing systems ; A golden section for writing systems ; Artificial signs and natural shapes ; Prehistoric precursors of writing ; From counting to writing ; The limits of pictography ; The alphabet: a great leap forward ; Vowels: the mothers of reading. Learning to read : The birth of a future.