Voices in Time
WRI T T EN
;;;;: New York City
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Whatever language a person is reading, the same
area of inferotemporal cortex, the visual word-
form area, is activated. It makes relatively little
di;erence whether the language uses an alpha-
bet, like Greek or English, or ideograms, like
Chinese. ;is has been con;rmed by lesion stud-
ies and by imaging studies. And this idea is sup-
ported, too, by “positive” disorders—excesses or
distortions of function produced by hyperactivity
of the same area. ;e opposite of alexia, in this
sense, is lexical or text hallucination, or phantom
letters. People with disorders of the visual path-
way (anywhere from the retina to the visual cor-
tex) may be prone to visual hallucinations, and
Dominic ;ytche and his colleagues estimate that
about a quarter of these patients who hallucinate
see “text, isolated words, individual letters, num-
bers, or musical-note hallucinations.” Such lexical
hallucinations, as ;ytche and his colleagues have
found, are associated with conspicuous activation
of the left occipitotemporal region, especially the
visual word-form area—the same area that, if
damaged, produces alexia.
