Reading & in-betweens: Making sense of words

If you are reading this column, in all probability you have already gone through a lot of words and sentences with much ease: You are a proficient reader who uses existing knowledge to make sense of text. Billions of humans belong to this category — just glancing through words and deciphering the meaning of a sentence, sometimes within the blink of an eye.

We appear to be natural at reading, but is that true? Formal reading and writing evolved just a few thousand years ago, much later after the first civilisations came into existence.

To develop reading skills, the brain