The Reading Brain

I've got a review of Stanislas Dehaene's new book, Reading in the Brain, over at the Barnes and Noble Review:

Right now, your mind is performing an astonishing feat. Photons are bouncing off these black squiggles and lines -- the letters in this sentence -- and colliding with a thin wall of flesh at the back of your eyeball. The photons contain just enough energy to activate sensory neurons, each of which is responsible for a particular plot of visual space on the page. The end result is...