Reading Rewires Brain Function

Over the last few days, there has been a lot of interesting discussion about the role of the literacy specialist in the Norwalk Public Schools.

Our focus on literacy, especially for elementary age students, underlies the obvious assumption that reading is important.  However, after listening to a National Public Radio report last week, I learned that reading is important for more than accumulating knowledge.  The mere act of regular reading improves our brain.

According to a study published in the journal Neuron, "intensive instruction to improve reading skills in young children causes the brain to physically rewire itself, creating new white matter that improves communication within the brain."



The NPR story reports:

The study found that several different programs improved the integrity of fibers that carry information from one part of the brain to another.

"That helped areas of the brain work together," says Marcel Just, director of the Center for Cognitive Brain Imaging at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

Coordination is important because reading involves a lot of different parts of the brain, Just says.

Some parts recognize letters, others apply knowledge about vocabulary and syntax, and still others decide what it all means. To synchronize all these operations, the brain relies on high speed "highways" that carry information back and forth, he says.

Mr. Just and his colleague Timothy Keller studied the MRIs of children 8 to 12 years old and found that children with poor reading skills had lower-quality white matter or brain connectivity compared to typical readers. Over six months, some of the poor readers were given 100 hours of remedial reading instruction, which focused on decoding unfamiliar words. Four different remedial reading programs were used but there was little difference in improvement among them. 

When they were done, a second set of MRI scans showed that the training changed "not just their reading ability, but the tissues in their brain," Just says. The integrity of their white matter improved, while it was unchanged for children in standard classes.

Equally striking, Just says: "The amount of improvement in the white matter in an individual was correlated with that individual's improvement in his reading ability."

In a press release by Carnegie Mellon, Mr. Just said: "Showing that it's possible to rewire a brain's white matter has important implications for treating reading disabilities and other developmental disorders, including autism."

Has anyone had experience with an intensive remedial reading program?  How does it differ from reading taught in a regular classroom?