Study: Our eyes and brain work together to create a ‘pipeline’ of meaning

Humans read by ‘pre-processing’ written words to create a pipeline of meaning, according to new research at the University of Birmingham.

A study, published in Nature Communications, shows that each pre-processing judgment can take place extremely rapidly—within just 100ms after the eye lands on the previous word. The neuronal activity required to scan the next word in a sentence also increases according to the complexity of the word, the researchers found.