How do these symbols, the ones you’re scanning right now, turn into the images and dialogue happening in your mind as you read? Despite literacy being perhaps the most basic requirement to conduct research, the manner in which our mind reads has barely been studied. And yet, it’s a skill exclusive to human beings and part of our ancient collective memory. Early forms of writing have been dated as far back as at least 5,500 years ago, but the best answer scientists offer to explain the phenomenon of the mental experience of reading today? Imagination.

In fact, we know more about how to read and why we fail to read rather than how we can read. It turns out that reading is particularly difficult to study. The term itself, really, is so broad that pinpointing exactly what to study is complicated since there are so many varying reasons people read. Skimming, for instance, is like pattern identification. Studying is a form of memorization. Reading poetry is usually a mix of identifying structures and forming imagery. Reading for a study can have mixed results depending on whether the participant is asked to concentrate on extracting concepts or on speed and the results will look very different than if the participant is reading for themselves.

Take a step back and think about the way you read now. If you’re a fluent, natural reader you’re not reading every individual word or sounding out every individual letter. Your brain recognizes symbols and makes inferences so naturally that it’s easy to construct a sentence in word clusters by assumption. This makes your reading speed much faster and furthermore, faster, fluent readers tend to comprehend material much better than slower readers. Why? The slower reader is likely going back in the text to make inferences more often than the faster reader who likely has already made them as they read.

Still, the original question that brings us all here has yet to be touched on. How does imagery work? How are you making those pictures in your head from these symbols? Here’s the thing: judging whether a mental image is accurate or even vivid is difficult to study as well. Your visualization is inherently subjective. Every mental picture you form is influenced by your life, personal experiences, preconceived notions. And who’s to say you’re wrong? Maybe the better question is, who’s to say you’re right? Visual recall is either imagination or working memory and it’s easy enough to see which your brain is actively using. That’s how lie detectors work. As you read, it’s likely that both types of visual recall are how your mind actively creates visualization.

This clinical look isn’t complete, though. Reading involves complex mental experiences - lived experiences. The experience is still baffling to researchers as it appears to be a function of our brains that the brain wasn’t made for. Looking at what happens in the mind as we’re reading is barely scratching the surface and only explains how we read, not the way reading allows for imagination. A complicated concoction of emotion, judgment, assumption, and history (both social and personal) to name a few, all play a factor in the experience. The question of how we experience reading is like asking how we live; it’s the question of cognition, and we haven’t put that puzzle together yet either.

Reading is fascinating as an activity. Stories and words are inherently works of art, but reading is perhaps the only art that creates a different form of cognitive art. Two parts of your brain are simultaneously working to form a harmonious agreement between page and perception. No book ever written has been read the same way twice. To make a comparison, when you watch a painter, you see the brush sweeping color back and forth across a stretch of canvas to express an image. As you read, your eyes sweep back and forth across the page to form an image that no one has ever seen in exactly the same way before.

Yet still, reading only works if we are open to empathizing with the experiences of another in every physical and emotional way as we go, making it both a singular and collective experience. And maybe how that happens is supposed to remain a mystery. After all, isn’t magic just a mystery science hasn’t solved yet?

Reading is Scientifically Magical