Inside the Reading Mind
5,500 years ago, ancient Sumerians etched on clay tablets with “pens” made of giant reeds found along marshes in Mesopotamia (now southern Iraq). They were writing in cuneiform, the earliest known writing system.
A couple hundred years later, Egyptians created a system of pictures for words and sounds, called hieroglyphs. They dipped reed brushes into ink to write on papyrus. Writing (and reading) later originated separately in China and Mesoamerica.
But human brains developed long before we could read or write. So how does our species achieve this intricate task?
A “Map” of the Brain
Our brains are complex and interconnected. This is just a small
