What Happens in Your Brain When you Read?
Reading may appear to us as a commonplace task. After all, the brain is constantly involved in automatically, and seemingly effortlessly, decoding environmental text, such as street signs, food labels, advertisements, and more. And curling up with a good book seems more like a relaxing activity than a cognitively-demanding learning task.
A recently published meta-analysis of hundreds of experiments that used medical imaging to see inside the brain during literacy and phonological-processing tasks sheds light on how the brain processes written language.
The meta-analysis that was published in Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Review in June, 2025, revealed that simple tasks like decoding a single word, glancing at text on signpost, reading a bedtime story out loud, or relaxing with a novel, all, in fact, require complex interactions between several parts of the brain, reported Science Alert.
A Meta-Analysis of Studies
This study is the brainchild of German neuroscientist, Sabrina Turker, according to a University of Leipzig news release. That’s because she was concerned about a lack of information about the organization of language in the brain. She said in the news release, “Much of what we do know comes from single studies with small numbers of subjects and has not been confirmed in follow-up studies.”
To change that, she spearheaded the large-scale meta-analysis that looked at more than 160 different research papers. According to My Modern Met, the studies that Turker’s team analyzed were very different from each other but they had in common two things. Every study involved some sort of reading-related task, ranging from in-depth reading of a long passage, to reading out loud, to decoding nonsense words in one’s head. The studies also all used PET scans or MRI’s to uncover what took place in the readers’ minds as they carried out the reading tasks.
The Cerebellum’s Surprising Role
As expected, researchers found that the reading tasks caused the parts of the brain associated with cognition and visual perception to light up. However, they were surprised to uncover the cerebellum’s role in reading.
The cerebellum is a large region of the brain that plays a role in movement and balance, not skills that we would typically associate with decoding texts. The research team found that all reading tasks, but especially anything related to reading out loud, activated the right hemisphere of the cerebellum, whereas reading individual words alone (rather than sentences or paragraphs) activated the left cerebellum.
Whole-Brain Involvement
The meta-analysis found that reading is a complex process, involving many parts of the brain. This includes regions that researchers predicted would be involved, such as the left cerebral hemisphere, which is associated with linguistic tasks, and those that surprised researchers, like the cerebellum.
The meta-analysis also showed that silent reading activated parts of the brain related to cognition, whereas reading out loud was more likely to spike activity in auditory and motor regions, according to Science Alert.
It turns out that, as your eyes scan the words in this very article, complex neural chains in several parts of your brain are extremely active. Which makes it all the more incredible that people can scan, read, and decode almost effortlessly.
