For most kids, learning to read is just a question of practice. But an estimated 20 percent of Americans have persistent trouble converting letters on a page into sounds. Recently a brain-imaging study pinpointed where that seemingly magical conversion takes place. That was an important result: a first step toward untangling the neurological basis of why so many perfectly smart people have trouble learning to read. But what grabbed headlines was the study’s second result: women do it differently from men.
The authors of the study, pediatrician Sally Shaywitz and her husband, neurologist Bennett Shaywitz, weren’t looking for sex differences; as codirectors of the Yale University Center for the Study of Learning and Attention, they’ve been studying reading disabilities for a long time. For their most recent study, though, the Shaywitzes used the most sophisticated new brain-imaging technique available--functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Like other brain-imaging techniques, fMRI detects tiny ...
