The Unbelievable Science of How We Read

As a graphic designer, in school, the biggest thing we were taught is that 90% of our work shouldn’t be noticed.

It would be very interesting to relate this with reading sheet music, music is a language and when you read sheet music there must be a lot going on in your brain, not only you have to understand the information about pitch and rythm, but your brain has to figure out the movements requiered to accurately produce the sounds through your instrument or your voice, all in real time without loosing a beat. When I was first studying sight reading I remember my teacher always telling us not to read note by note, you have to read whole phrases at once, because otherwise you would never have enough time to perform the music correctly. There must be some kind of musical "word superiority effect" going on, that allows us to read and perform sheet music.

I used to work in a care home for elderly patients, and there was a 92 year old lady with late stage dementia, should could barely formulate a sentence…yet she could still read! You’d give her a letter that had come for her in the post and she’d read it all aloud. It’s very deeply embedded into us

I’m dyslexic and when you mentioned the part that we “don’t sound out words in our heads when we read” that is exactly what I do, I always wondered why other people find they can read faster in their head than out loud because for me it’s exactly the same.

This is so cool! When I read a book it’s usually a voice in my head reading it (but my thoughts are like that constantly). But when I get really into a book I’ll stop reading individual words and it turns into something like watching a movie in my head, seeing images rather than hearing words.

I've always been noticably slower at reading than everyone else, because I read at about the same speed as I speak. I was in my late 20s when I learned that other people don't "say" every word in their head as they read. Whenever I'm watching something and text appears on-screen, I often struggle to read the entire thing before it disappears, and I spent my entire life wondering why they make it disappear so fast. It was when I told someone about this grievance that I learned that other people don't read "out loud" in their mind.

I've tried learning how to scan a sentence the way other people describe, but no luck. I think my brain might be cemented like this. If only I'd have discovered this when I was a developing kid in school.

As a dyslexic growing up having to go to a special "reading tutor" for years to help train my brain, I really appreciate this video, and I think it would have really helped me if I could comprehend it. Its really peculiar to look back at that time, and remember how my brain kept guessing the wrong meaning. My brain would always miss interperate a word and a different word. It was like my brain could only see the tall letters, its very strange. But I did come out of it reading at a college level in junior high, so I was killer at reading comprehension lol

It would be dope to see the letters sized the same and an example shown just for the shock factor, or just to be able to really feel how much it would distract from automatic reading

Someone once pointed out to me, you cannot look at a word and not read it (so long as you know the alphabet that is), and it completely blew my mind.

I wish they would've touched on the subject of Dyslexia and how that affects someone's way of reading compared to what they described. Also, I wonder how it works with languages that have different symbols and if they're learned and read in a similar way.

7:00 "you're brain ISN'T sounding out the words as you read"
mine does. and it's extremely distracting and frustrating. it is very, very difficult to turn it off or ignore it & doing so usually distracts me more. this is probably the biggest reason i read so slowly.

I think the reason we learn to read words initially by sounding them out is to give us the tools to aquire new words we are not already familiar with. This allows us to be able to independently add new words to our vocabulary through out life as we encounter them, since we learned a method to decode the word until we became familiar enough with it to recognize it at a glance.

I've realized this phenomenon while reading. During intense parts of the story, I'll "skim ahead" to get to the point faster and then go back and read regularly to before that part. Well.. it always turns out that I DID read and process nearly all the words and I just waste time reading them again. It's pretty interesting!

I always read the words out loud in my head. I'm one of those people who has the non-stop internal monologue going, and it doesn't stop when I'm reading.

You definitely read whole words rather than individual letters. In fact, your brain is so good at it that as long as you keep the correct starting and ending letters of a word and repeating letters (i.e., the same sound) together you can scramble the inner letters of a word but still be able to fairly easily decipher the correct word. For example, can you guess what this says: I LKIE ADOACVO. IT IS GEERN AND TSTAY.

I experienced it again when I learned to read the Korean alphabet. My brain struggled to recognize full words right away, and I still read it slower than Latin letters.
Yet I am absolutely in love with the letters and their shapes in Hangeul.

I feel like I read it out loud in my head. I've always thought I was a slow reader. If I just scan the page and purposefully read quickly I get panicked. I actually "hear" the words as I read them. There's a voice behind them.

This entire video is actually a good introduction to typeface design. Making certain letters longer than others to make them "look" the same; designing letters so that negative space works together (since the word, not the letter, is the basic thing you read); spacing the lines out just right so that they line up with your saccades; etc. etc. Its crazy how technical it is, and typographers pretty much figured all this out by hundreds of years of trial-and-error (Typography is quite an arcane field) without having any concept of what your brain is actually doing.

I am from Indonesia and we write with the same alphabet as English, but when I read, I notice in my native language, I read something in the visualization of what I think... I describe words in a real shape as a picture. It's so different when I read in English, I was so good when I read movie subtitles because I see the picture, but when I read a book, my mind reads it as a 'word'. I was sometimes frustrated why my head can't do the same when I read in Indonesian words. I notice this when I read english novels. Maybe it's because I am still learning English, but it's so weird how my brain works differently just by the language I use

I wish you could do a follow-up on this on why some dyslexic people can't read as smoothly or make mistakes in both reading and writing.