Date: 24/02/23 Speaker: Geoffrey Boynton Bio: Reading is a remarkable skill that is easy to take for granted. Right now the image of this paragraph is focused on your eyes’ retinas, yet when you read these words it feels like you’re pulling in only one word at a time. This means that while you’re reading, somewhere between the eye and your conscious experience most of the information on this page is lost. I will discuss how we have been using functional MRI and behavioral methods to show how, while reading words, the brain’s attentional mechanism transforms the inherently parallel stream of incoming visual information to support the serial process of reading.