The ability to read is something firmly established in the human brain: regardless of the language we use or the culture to which we belong, this unique ability in nature activates a region of the thinking organ called the visual word-forming area (VWFA, for its acronym in English) . But it so happens that writing was invented only 5,400 years ago, an overwhelmingly insufficient time for the VWFA to have emerged as a product of evolution .
Some scientists attribute it to a phenomenon of " neuronal recycling" ; that is, we would recognize words by reusing the same nerve cells that we used to detect simple objects or faces. Something, theoretically, within the reach of other animals .
An experiment carried out with pigeons, which evolutionarily separated from humans more than 300 million years ago, points in this direction. After selecting the four smartest birds from a group of 18 and training them for eight months, the scientists were able to discriminate up to 58 four-letter words from many other non-word combinations .
As the study authors explain in the PNAS journal, pigeons even detected the unions of two letters (digrams) admitted by the English language to represent a sound, a basic skill in acquiring spelling skills .
