( word perception in the ventral cortex...)'Word-vision' brain area confirmed

Importantly, the researchers observed that before the surgery, the patient could recognize long words as quickly as short ones; but after the surgery, the recognition time increased linearly as a function of word length. Such findings indicated that the patient had been reduced to recognizing words letter by letter.

"How could there be a piece of neural tissue dedicated to a recently invented cognitive skill like word recognition?" wondered Alex Martin in a preview of the paper in the same issue of Neuron. Nevertheless, Martin commented, Cohen and his colleagues "report a unique set of findings in favor of the existence of the VWFA that will surely add fuel to the debate." He concluded that "The single case study…provides compelling evidence that the VWFA plays a causal role in the chain of neural events that underlie normal reading."