A recent study conducted at Stanford University shows that products designed to help children read better can actually "rewire" their brains and significantly improve their reading ability.

Elise Temple and her colleagues used brain scans to investigate the changes that occurred in the brain activity of dyslexic children as they used the Fast ForWord Language product from Scientific Learning Corporation. The results from this study were published in the March 4, 2003 edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Dyslexia is a disorder that inhibits the reading ability of 5 to 17% of the U.S. population. Certain reading remediation products—such as Scientific Learning's Fast ForWord Language software—have been successful in alleviating the difficulties many children have with reading, but an actual biological basis for this improvement has not been demonstrated until now.

Dyslexic children tend to show lower than average activity in certain areas of the brain as they attempt to read. The areas of the brain with decreased activity have been shown to be activated when phonemes (rapidly changing sounds that are the building blocks of words) are processed and synthesized into meaningful language. It is well known that dyslexic children often have trouble processing phonemes, and many remediation products target this skill.

The Stanford researchers began their study to see if areas of the brain that tend to show less activity in dyslexic children showed any changes during the use of a reading remediation product.

The researchers found that the brain activity in the dyslexic children began to look more like that of children with normal reading ability after eight weeks of using the reading remediation product. Interestingly, children undergoing reading remediation also showed additional activity in areas of the brain that are not normally activated during reading. The researchers speculated that perhaps this "extra" activation added to the remediation process, helping the children along in their development, possibly by compensating for the brain activity that was impaired in the areas of the brain usually activated during reading. These results are consistent with other studies that have shown that after the language centers of the brain have been damaged, as the patient's language skills improve through speech therapy, compensatory increases in activity within other "non-language" centers of the brain are also seen. This "rewiring" of connections within the brain is a common phenomenon in neuroscience, and evidence of the flexible nature of the brain has been steadily accumulating over the past two decades.