Chapter Six - The Expert Reader and What Happens to the Brain

Half of a second is the amount of time it takes an expert reader to read a most words. The author writes ten pages of technical information explaining just what happens to the brain when we read a word. It is interesting and fascinating what goes on in our brains. I only wish that I could convey all the information she writes because it is amazing how the brain is functioning as you read. I’m even more baffled that we obtain the ability to read at all. The author titles this ten page section “Every Word Has Milliseconds of Fame”. The first section 0 to 100 Milliseconds explains what the first cognitive actions are when an expert reader looks at a word:
• 1. To disengage from what you are doing
• 2. To move our attention to the new focus
• 3. To spotlight the new letter and word

The next section is “50 to 150 Milliseconds, Recognizing a Letter and Changing a Brain.” The visual cortex of our brain changes when we learn to read. Our visual area becomes crowded with cells networking visual images of letters, letter pattern and words and it happens at a quick, quick speed. The third section “100 to 200 Milliseconds: Connecting Letters to Sounds and Orthography to Phonology.” An expert reader will know the guidelines of a language. Letter-sound or grapheme-phoneme connection is the core of the alphabetic principle. When this happens it changes the way the brain function. “200 to 500 Milliseconds getting to all that we know about a Word” what we know and learn about words is forever changing. How quickly we can read word depends on the knowledge we have about a word. If it is the first time we have seen a word our brain slows down because we are trying to gain knowledge about the word, but the more we see and read the word the quicker we process. Lastly, “Syntactic and Morphological Processes”, this is syntactic processing when we are connecting text like sentences and passages. Intriguing isn’t it?

When we read over time what we read changes because we bring our life experiences with us. We mature and we bring all our love, joy, pain, sorrow, failure, successes, and triumphs to what we read. Depending on what we are feeling when we are reading a certain text affects us and changes us.