Build Keynote: How Learning to Read Changes the Brain: Implications for Education The remarkable plasticity of the human brain allows it to acquire new abilities through schooling and education. In my talk, I will describe our latest data on how the brain learns to read. Reading acquisition recycles several pre-existing visual and auditory areas of the brain in order to reorient them to the processing of letters and phonemes. Comparisons of literate and illiterate brains have revealed three major sites of enhancement due to schooling: the early visual cortex, the « visual word form area » (also known as “the brain’s letter box”, a region specializing for the visual recognition of letter strings) and the planum temporale (a region involved in phonological processing). New brain imaging and modelling studies paint a detailed picture of how the ventral visual cortex and associated language areas become attuned to reading. I will end by examining the two consequences of those findings: (1) how to best teach reading, by focusing on letters, their order and their correspondences to phonemes, (2) how to diagnose different forms of dyslexia, some of which occur purely at the visual level. Stanislas Dehaene Chair of Experimental Cognitive Psychology Collége de France