… writing was born only fifty-four hundred years ago in the Fertile Crescent, and the alphabet itself is only thirty-eight hundred years old. These time spans are a mere trifle in evolutionary terms. Evolution thus did not have the time to develop specialized reading circuits in Homo sapiens. Our brain is built on the genetic blueprint that allowed our hunter-gatherer ancestors to survive. We take delight in reading Nabokov and Shakespeare using a primate brain originally designed for life in the African savanna. Nothing in our evolution could have prepared us to absorb language through vision. Yet brain imaging demonstrates that the adult brain contains fixed circuitry exquisitely attuned to reading. —Stanislas Dehaene, Reading in the Brain: The New Science of How We Read