Motion, not just the black-and-white contrast of the printed word, can help us recognize words, and thus to read, a new study shows. The finding not only demonstrates the flexibility of the human visual system, but it also may have implications for dyslexia and other reading disorders. An area of the brain called the Visual Word Form Area, or VWFA, is activated whenever it sees something that looks like a word—and is so adept at packaging visual input for the brain’s language centers that activation happens within a few tens of milliseconds.
