Perhaps the most striking feature of the inferior temporal neurons is that many of their preferred shapes closely resemble our letters, symbols, or ele­mentary Chinese characters. Some neurons respond to two superimposed circles forming a figure eight, others react to the conjunc­tion of two bars to form a T, and others prefer an asterisk, a … Read more

Any object projects a very different image on the retina when lit from two dif­ferent angles or when presented either on the left or on the right of visual fixation. This variability poses a severe challenge to the neural circuits that construct the categories with which we recognize the world. When we need to identify … Read more

Writing—this ingenious art to paint words and speech for the eyes. GFORGES DE It RF BREUF (French poet, 1617-1661) When he paid a visit to Ambrose, then bishop of Milan, Augustine observed a phenomenon that he judged strange enough to be worth noting in his memoirs: When [Ambrose] read, his eyes scanned the page and … Read more

One may wonder why English sticks to such a complicated spelling system. Indeed, Italians do not meet with the same problems. Their spelling is trans­parent: every letter maps onto a single phoneme, with virtually no exceptions. As a result, it only takes a few months to learn to read. This gives Italians an enormous advantage: … Read more

The tale of reading begins when the retina receives photons reflected off the written page. But the retina is not a homogeneous sensor. Only its central part, called the fovea, is dense in high-resolution cells sensitive to incoming light, while the rest of the retina has a coarser resolution. The fovea, which occupies about 15 … Read more