Becoming virtually automatic does not happen overnight and is not a characteristic of either a novice bird-watcher or a young novice reader. These circuits and pathways are created through hundreds or, in the case of some children with reading disabilities like dyslexia, thousands of exposures to letters and words. The neuronal pathways for recognizing letters, letter patterns, and words become automatic thanks to retinotopic organization, object recognition capacities, and to one other extremely important dimension of brain organization: our ability to represent highly learned patterns of
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