Intense Reading Program Rewires Kids' Brains

Saw this on the Facebook page of a friend, Gilbert Tan: Intense Reading Program Rewires Kids' Brains. An excerpt:

Children who undergo intensive remedial reading programs not only become better readers but can also end up with rewired brains that are better at communicating, a study published Wednesday said.

Carnegie Mellon University scientists Marcel Just and Timothy Keller scanned the brains of 72 children before and after they went through a six-month program to make them better readers.

The scans of the eight- to 10-year-olds' brains showed that the quality of white matter—the brain tissue that carries signals between areas of grey matter, where information is processed—improved substantially after 100 hours of remedial reading training, said the study, which was published online in the journal Neuron.

While the imaging indicated that the white matter had become more efficient at transmitting signals, testing showed that the children could read better.