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The provided text explores why silent reading was a rare skill for much of human history and how it eventually became the norm.
Summary: The Evolution of Silent Reading
Oral Origins: Writing was originally developed to encode speech and was intended for public performance (proclamations, religious texts, sagas) rather than private consumption.
Lack of Structure: Early written language lacked the visual cues we rely on today—such as spaces between words, punctuation, and paragraphs—making it much harder to decode without sounding it out.
The Phonological Loop: Our brains use a "phonological loop" to buffer speech sounds. Even when reading silently today, we often engage in subvocalisation, where our vocal muscles are subtly activated as we "sound out" words in our minds.
Historical Shift: While figures like Julius Caesar practiced silent reading in antiquity, the skill only became widespread with the printing press and the rise of mass literacy during the Renaissance.
Would you like me to find more historical examples of early silent reading or perhaps explain more about the psychology of the "phonological loop"?
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