nickdouglas:

Engel couldn’t see words with his eyes. His visual cortex was broken. But he could “see” when he used the motor part of his brain, first by tracing letters on a page, then by “writing” those same letters in the air, and then, strangely, when he shifted to copying letters with his tongue on the roof of his mouth. Tongue-copying was the fastest.

This is fascinating stuff.

Whenever I travel out of the country, I find that my brain is constantly working overtime to try and parse the language around me: signs, newspapers, receipts, billboards, etc. … and to be honest it gets in the way sometimes, because I spend all my time looking at character forms instead of enjoying the scenery. It doesn’t help that I understand varying levels of Spanish, French, Portuguese, and (very, very little) German, because that doesn’t give much of a visual respite anywhere in Europe or the Americas.

And then one month, I spent a week in Korea and a week in Japan, staring at letterforms (well, wordforms, technically) that I could never parse. And suddenly, the words became just part of the patterns of the world around me, and I was at ease.