From these recordings, they identified two brain networks that play a key role in the reading process. One network involves an area of the brain’s frontal lobe that sends signals to the temporal lobe, which shows progressive activation when a person is making complex meanings with sentence length.
The second network involves another region of the brain’s temporal lobe that sends signals to an area of the frontal lobe, facilitating the understanding of sentence context and the reading of each new word.
“Electrodes implanted in the brain give us a unique insight into the inner workings of the human mind, especially for fast processes, such as reading. Our work is making it clear that most processes – say comprehension or language production – do not occur in one area, but are best understood as very transient states that allow many different areas of the brain to have very brief, yet important, interactions,” said Tandon, senior author of the study, who The Nancy, Clive and Pierce Runnels Distinguished Chair in Neuroscience at the Vivian L. Smith Center for Neurologic Research and the BCMS Distinguished Professor in Neurological Disorders and Neurosurgery with McGovern Medical School.