“Reading changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you fit the words together into sentences. This takes an amazing amount of ultra-fast processing. Brains that do this are different from brains that don’t.”