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But even on a basic visual level, we have to somewhat reprogram our visual systems.

Mirror invariance, the idea that something flipped sideways is still the same object, is a core property of our visual systems, and for good reason.

What's the mirror image of b? Now it's a completely different letter: d.

Mirror reversal is overwhelmingly common in beginning writers, from the occasional flipped letter to whole words written as a mirror image. Kids do this spontaneously. They never actually see flipped letters in the world around them. It's as if their brains are too powerful for the task.

With practice however, we do retrain our brains to read

Does the brain of a reader look different from that of a nonreader?

Since blood flow is tied to brain activity, fMRI allows us to see the patches of brain involved in different tasks.

They found that most participants did indeed have a brain region that responded more to words than objects.

This is rather remarkable, that the brain would develop a specialized area for an artificial category of images.

need more proof that this region developed as a result of learning to read.

If reading experience does alter the brain, you would expect English readers and English/Hebrew readers to have different brain responses to Hebrew. And this is indeed what Baker found. The bilingual readers had high activation for both Hebrew and English in their word region, while monolingual English readers only had high activation for English.