"It's important to remember that a good third of our visual cortex ... is devoted to literacy, reading. This 5000-year-old cultural invention has usurped a huge chunk of the brain," he said. "One of the trade-offs of this is that people who can read are a little worse at 'quote-unquote' reading the natural world and remembering objects such as plants and animals, because so much of our visual vortex is devoted to letters, syllables and words."
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