Can we look at brain imaging patterns and tell which children will have trouble reading?
This technology has been an extraordinary advance, but I don’t want to mislead people. We can’t use it yet to diagnose an individual. Someone cannot get into the scanner and say, “Aha, I have an image, and I can have a diagnosis.” But I have no doubt about the potential for this technology to diagnose people early and more precisely and then to actually examine the effects of interventions. What difference, specifically, did you see in the brain patterns of good and poor readers? Good readers had a pattern of activation in the back of the brain, the system that includes the occipital region, which is activated by the visual features of the letters; the angular gyrus where print is transcoded into language; and Wernicke’s region, the area of the brain that accesses meaning. This posterior area is strongly activated in good readers, but we saw relative under- activation in poor readers. As we asked good readers to do more and more phonologic processing——to look at single letters and tell
