The leading authority on the neuroscience of language, Stanislaus Dehaene, notes that thanks to modern brain imaging, we now know that every time you or I read a single word in print, the combination of letters moves through our retinas and explodes into thousands of fragments within our brain, which then pieces them back together by asking a series of questions:
- Are these letters?
- What do they look like?
- Are they a word?
- What does it sound like?
- How is it pronounced?
- What does it mean?
All of this happens in a millisecond without our awareness, an astounding feat that causes Dehaene to ask, “How can a few black marks on white paper projected onto your retina evoke an entire universe?”
Think of it: Not only did God choose to reveal himself through words, first spoken and then put into print, but he created you and me with this inimitable capacity to read them. Why?
The most important reason is that we might know him—his ways, his character, his attributes, and his heart—not through the finiteness of an image set in wood or stone but through words that live, that are layered, nuanced, multiform in their power to illuminate, and yet always able to raise us to new vistas of revelation.
Tricia McCary Rhodes is the author of several books including The Wired Soul: Finding Spiritual Balance in a Hyperconnected Age. She is an adjunct professor of practical theology at Fuller Seminary. Taken from The Wired Soul copyright © 2016 by Tricia McCary Rhodes. Used by permission of NavPress. All rights reserved. Represented by Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
