Hey smart people, Joe here.

Today I’m going to teach you how to read.

Which  is something that you already know how to do, obviously, but you probably have no  idea how you’re actually doing it.

But first I need to let you in on a secret: There’s a trick being played on  you every time you read something.

In fact it’s right in front of  you right now.

Do you see it?

Let’s take a closer look at just a couple  of letters and see if you can see it then.

Here’s just the C and T. These two  letters are exactly the same weight, or “size” in this typeface, so you’d  figure they’re the exact same height.

But watch what happens when I lay them on top  of each other.

The C is ever-so-slightly taller.

It’s true for other letter pairs  too.

Like E and S. The S is taller.

It’s even true for other typefaces, like this one.

Letters that look the same size  are actually… not the same size.

And this… is on purpose.

Because if they actually were the  same size, mathematically speaking they wouldn’t look the same size.

Letters with rounded tops have to be slightly  taller than letters with flat tops in order for them to appear the same size.

This illusion is hiding in just about everything you’ve ever read.

Yes, it’s even in Comic Sans!

Your letters are lying to  you!

But if this illusion wasn’t there, words would look really weird.

And that’s because we don’t read with a ruler.

We read with our brain.

And  our brains like to lie to us.

The reason all this happens is related to  another illusion that maybe you’ve seen before.

This line appears longer than this one.

But  in reality the two lines are the same length.

This is one of the most famous  illusions in visual science.

And there’s lots of different versions  of it.

I mean, this is one of the most powerful illusions I’ve ever seen.

Even  when you know the lines are the same length, it doesn’t change the story your brain tells you.

It’s really weird!

So what does this have to do with letters?

Well, we can explain what’s happening here if we turn the Müller-Lyer illusion on its side: This line, with its ends,  looks kinda like the letter O.

The other line is more like an I or a T. Our brains decide round letters like O look  smaller than more squared off letters nearby, so we have to make the O bigger  just to look the same size.

So that’s a really cool  illusion that fools you probably hundreds of times a day.

And it shows us  that there’s a lot more going on with how we recognize letters and words and turn  them into meaning than you might expect.

In other words: Reading is really weird.

Now, a good reader can recognize  hundreds of words per minute.

And once you learn how to do it, most of us  don’t have to actually think about reading.

It just happens.

But while it feels automatic, there’s  a lot going on under the hood.

Or under the skull really.

You’re just not consciously aware of any of it.

When ya think about it it’s actually  pretty weird that we can read at all.

I mean, our brains evolved, pretty much in their  current form, a hundred thousand years ago or so.

But writing is only a few thousand years old.

And standardized movable type, that was only  invented like one thousand years ago, in Asia.

And then Gutenberg invented  it again like 600 years ago.

I mean think about this: As recently as the 1800s  maybe 1 in 8 people actually knew how to read.

It’s clearly not something that we evolved  to do.

But we can.

So what’s up with that?

Luckily I happen to know a language expert, and  she just so happens to have her own YouTube show.

So I asked her.

Thanks, Joe!

I’m Dr. Erica Brozovsky, sociolinguist and  certified word nerd.

On my show Otherwords, we delve into the amazing facets  of human language, and the ability to read is  one that almost defies logic.

How can a brain that evolved like a hundred  thousand of years ago be so naturally good at a skill that we only invented 5,000 years  ago?

It’s been called the “paradox of reading” The answer may be that we’ve repurposed  some existing brain functions for new uses.

It’s a theory neuroscientist Stanislas  Dehaene called "neural recycling" By studying the neural patterns of monkeys,  scientists have been able to identify how their brains identify and make sense of the  contours and lines that make up visual scenes.

A corner here, an edge there, some intersecting  edges here.

And it seems like there’s a basic "alphabet" of simple shapes that their brains  use to decode any number of possible scenes.

What’s interesting is these shapes are  remarkably similar to the strokes that make up most human writing.

Whenever one  object is behind another, you get a T shape.

Corners of objects  make L's and F's and Y's.

And an O can be found in anything from a  delicious fruit… to the eye of a predator.

What these shapes have in common is that  they're "non-accidental".

If you threw a bunch of toothpicks on the floor, very rarely would  three land with their ends perfectly touching.

So if you see this pattern in real life…  it's probably worth paying attention to, and our brains are especially  adept at spotting it.

Each pattern in this “shape  alphabet” triggers neurons, and when certain combinations  of neurons fire together, they trigger higher order neurons that help  us eventually decode the meaning of an image.

So this combination from our shape  alphabet triggers the meaning “cat”.

And so does this combination.

Only, one is a group of shapes in nature, and one is just a collection of lines on paper.

Early alphabets that used such shapes allowed  more people to read, and let them read faster, eventually replacing cumbersome pictographic  writing systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics.

As Dehaene says, "...our cortex did  not specifically evolve for writing… writing evolved to fit the cortex."

That… is amazing.

So let’s take a closer look at what’s happening when your brain decodes all these shapes  and tries to make meaning out of them.

How do we read?!

One thing that we know about reading is that your brain isn’t sounding  out words as you scan the page, like speaking them in your head.

I mean, you might  be able to make yourself consciously do that… One fish, two fish, red fish, blue fish That’s not how it works.

When you read, your brain is directly  turning those printed symbols into meaning.

Now, words are made of letters.

And we’ve already seen that we’re really sensitive to the shapes combinations of  letters have when they’re put together.

So the big question to figure out is: When we  recognize a word, do we see a whole word and just recognize it by its shape?

Or do we actually read the letters?

You can think of the question this way: When I see  an elephant, do I see all the individual parts: it’s big, it’s gray, ears, trunk,  tusks, and recognize it that way?

Or do I just see the whole thing  and say “that’s an elephant”?

To figure that big question  out, in the 1880s a psychologist flashed words or letters in front of  people for just a few milliseconds.

And people more accurately recognized  the whole words than letters all alone.

And later experiments in the 1960s flashed either  real words or nonsense words in front of people then asked if they recognized  some particular letter And people recognized the right letter  better when it was in a real word.

These were a pretty good hint that, to our  brains, there’s something special about whole words over just letters.

The “Word Superiority Effect.” And this is kind of strange when you think  about how we learn to read.

When we’re young we make words by sounding out the letters or  combinations of letters in the order they appear.

av-o-cah-do That’s the “phonics” in “hooked on phonics” But the word superiority effect  says that once we learn to read, we don’t actually process words like that.

We just… see the word.

And we recognize it.

Now, at first scientists thought we  recognized the literal shape of the word.

Like if your brain sees this shape it  analyzes that pattern of ascending and descending characters, and the  word “shape” must be inside.

And this makes sense!

We tend to  read lowercase faster than all caps, where the letter shapes aren’t as prominent.

And (unless you’re super emo) we are terrible  at reading AlTeRnAtInG upper and lower case.

But that word shape explanation turned  out to be a little too simple.

Because you can’t spell READING… without the eye.

Because .

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eye .

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reading .

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never mind.

Now, obviously your eyes move when you  scan a page.

But they’re not scanning smoothly across lines of text.

They jump  around.

Sometimes they even jump backwards.

These little movements are  called saccades.

And they’re really fast.

One jump takes 20 to 35 milliseconds.

Around 10 times faster than the blink of an eye.

You don’t even notice this jumping because  it happens so fast it doesn’t even have time to register in your brain.

But why can’t we see  those jumps?

Does anyone know a neuroscientist?!

So here’s the crazy thing about saccades:  Your eyes are jumping around about three times a second, and in between  that they're making these little micro saccades, they're making little tiny jitters.

But you can't see the whole world streaking by.

Why not?

Well it's because when your  eyes go on this ballistic jump if we were actually seeing that it would look like  the world is streaking around all the time So we don't experience that.

Instead we  just experience the world out there.

Why?

It's a very deep reason actually.

It's because all you're ever seeing is your internal model of the outside  world.

You're not seeing the world as it is.

Because it actually takes time for your  eye to move from one place to another.

So what happened to that time?

Well it turns out your brain says okay i'm going to fill  in the gap with whatever I land on.

When your eyes land on the thing  you've got this gap in time and so your brain  essentially  retrospectively fills that in.

Thanks David Eagleman!

Your eyes stop  on a word for about 200 milliseconds, then they jump forward 7 to 9 letters.

But somehow your eyes never land in between words.

And some types of words: like short words  or connector words like “the” and “and” Your eyes just skip right over them altogether.

Now, how much information we gather each time  our eyes stop is limited by how our eye is built.

The fovea is the area in the center of your vision  where the photoreceptors are most densely packed, and where your vision is the sharpest.

It  senses an area about the size of your fingertip at arm’s length.

Around that is  an area called the parafovea.

The photoreceptors are less dense, and it can  see some details but things are kinda fuzzy.

And beyond that is basically your peripheral  vision, where the photoreceptors can basically just tell that there’s something there, but  are absolutely terrible at figuring out what.

Each time your eyes stop,  in that split second you’re gathering information from three different zones.

In the center, your fovea clearly  identifies 3 to 4 letters around where your eyes stop.

This is usually  enough to recognize that single word.

The second zone is in the  parafovea.

It’s much more blurry, but can get at least a hint at what the  first few letters of the next word are.

And beyond that is an even blurrier zone.

No  letters being identified here, but importantly you are sensing how long the next word or two is.

This gives you enough information to decide  where your eyes will move next.

If the next word is short and can be skipped, or whether it’s  long and unfamiliar so you should stop on it.

While you are recognizing the word you  are actually looking at and focusing on, another part of your eye is already reading  ahead to tell you what’s coming next.

All in all your eyes only stop on  about 60% of the words you read.

Yet somehow you still read all of them.

AND YOU HAVE NO IDEA YOU’RE DOING THIS.

So we seem to recognize words not because of their  shape, but because of the letters they contain.

Which maybe isn’t that surprising, except we’re seeing most of those  letters without actually looking at them.

We think the way we recognize  words works something like this: When your eyes land on or near a word, say SOAP, you see ALL the letters, that is, you process  their shapes - basically simultaneously.

You don’t scan the letters  from left to right one by one, as if your brain is looking  up a word in a dictionary.

You know, the first letter "s" the second  letter "o" .

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it doesn’t work that way.

Your brain simultaneously compares each letter position with those in  all the words you’ve seen before.

Think of your mental dictionary as a pool  full of words.

Every word with one letter in common gets a little jolt in your brain’s  neural networks and floats above the rest.

The words with two letters in common get a  bigger jolt in your brain and rise above those.

Then the words with three letters  in common get an even bigger jolt.

Until finally, the strongest signal in the  neural network of your brain’s dictionary rises to the top, and that’s the  winner: The word you recognize.

This happens over and over as your eyes  jump from spot to spot across the page, taking in different kinds of information from  various parts of your eye, unconsciously reading ahead in your brain, activating countless neural  networks, all in less than a quarter of a second.

And then you move your eyes, and do it again,  and again, and again.

All thanks to some ancient evolutionary ability you have to recognize  certain shapes, curves, and corners.

And the coolest part of all this is  the next time you pick up a book, you won’t even think about  any of this.

You’ll just enjoy a good story.

As long as the I’s  and the O’s are the right size at least… Stay curious.