What’s occurring in your brain as you read this

sentence?
To enable us to read, the brain piggybacks on other cognitive processes.

https://bigthink.com/neuropsych/language-processing-reading/?
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KEY TAKEAWAYS
 Reading requires a wide array of cognitive functions, all

of which must be coordinated and synchronized.

 
 One area involved in language processing, the Visual
Word Form Area, enables us to recognize sense from
nonsense. It's also what recognizes familiar faces in a
crowd of strangers
 
 When we read, the brain piggybacks on processes like
facial recognition. In this way, reading is an entirely
artificial and constructed neural talent — one which
demonstrates the brain's plasticity.
Jonny Thomson
As you read this sentence, your eyes are scanning across it in
saccadic, micro-jerking movements. These tiny, precise
muscles are controlled by the magnocellular tracking visual
system of your brain. This area also decodes the individual
letters and words (called graphemes) into their representative
sounds (called phonemes). It rapidly transforms the squiggles
that make up the word “bee” into the sound for “bee.” 
Meanwhile, Wernicke’s area is what enables you to
understand the meaning of words. Your angular gyrus is
working overtime to link the visual, auditory, syntactic
(grammar), and semantic (meaning) information. And finally,
you have to remember what happens at the beginning of this
sentence and you have to hold that information in your
working memory — for so very long, up to the very end of the
sentence — which uses your working memory functions,
found in the prefrontal lobe. If this makes you frustrated?
Well, that’s the amygdala.
The fact is, we know a lot about how the brain reads words.
We know both the neuroscientific aspects and the cognitive
functions required. But one of the bigger debates surrounding
literacy is how  our brains are so adapted and adaptable to
reading.
Nonsense words
There’s a small part of your brain, on the left side of your head
just above the ear, known as the Visual Word Form Area, or
the VWFA. This area is activated whenever we are decoding
the sublexical orthographic features of the word. In other
words, the VWFA lights up whenever we read strings of
letters that look like they obey certain syntactical rules. So, if
you read the word “guterion” this area will activate. However,
if you read the word “Ypbnitx,” it won’t. Why? Because the
former looks like it should be a word, but the latter looks like
gibberish.
The debate, though, is whether this small part of the brain is
uniquely activated for words or rather plays some other,
broader role in our cognitive functions. It’s an important
question because if the VWFA is only selective of
orthographic features (like words), it implies that somewhere
in our evolutionary or developmental history our brains
provided us with the ability to read: we are literally wired for
literacy.
I see faces everywhere

But there’s an increasing body of evidence pointing the other

way. The argument runs that there’s nothing literacy-specific
about the VWFA, but rather the reading brain co-opts it for
use with words. It serves a myriad of other roles. The VWFA
is used when presented with a variety of different visual
stimuli, such as in facial recognition. For instance, if you were
to scan a room of unknown people but then suddenly saw the
face of your best friend, the same part of your brain would
activate as if you were reading. The mental processes for
recognizing faces and reading familiar words are very similar.
This ability to spot and recognize familiar patterns is part of
being human. We see animals in clouds, faces on the moon,
and Jesus on burnt toast. In fact, imposing meaningful
interpretations on random stimuli is a phenomenon known as
pareidolia — a fascinating, and often humorous, cognitive
habit.
The view, then, is that our ability to read has piggybacked on a
much earlier function that emerged in the murky unknown of
our evolutionary past. We train our brains to see meaning in
meaningless shapes. We see faces amid the squiggles.
Reading changes you
The more we read, the more our brain becomes adapted to
reading. Whether the VWFA is word-specific or serves a
broader neuroscientific purpose, it’s something that gets better
with practice and use. Reading is not something humans can
do naturally. It takes effort and guided learning.
With songs, rhymes, and the slow, exaggerated speech parents
use with infants (known as “parentese”), we build the neural
networks that eventually enable literacy. We need to teach
phonetics, syntax, letter associations, and so on, so that the
brain learns to adapt itself to the new literacy demands we put
on it. We force the mind to read, we train the brain, and we
trick it to be used in new and “unnatural” ways (in the sense
that words are not found in nature). It’s an interesting point to
note, that those who cannot read well — dyslexics, for
instance — are only maladapted to a world that demands
literacy. Their brains cannot as easily rewire to meet the
demands placed on them by a society that reads and writes.
So, the next time you read a book or a Big Think article,
remember just how much is going on in your brain. And
remember how constructed this really is.