S/He-Brains

For most kids, learning to read is just a question of practice. But an estimated 20 percent of Americans have persistent trouble converting letters on a page into sounds. Recently a brain-imaging study pinpointed where that seemingly magical conversion takes place. That was an important result: a first step toward untangling the neurological basis of why so many perfectly smart people have trouble learning to read. But what grabbed headlines was the study’s second result: women do it differently from men.