The capacity to separate the senses & use the eye alone for reading is not instantly conferred on readers. Parallels with what is now occurring in New Guinea can be found in Western man's past. Thus in the Middle Ages, reading was aloud, often as song, and frequently in unison with readers standing & gesturing. Silent, lonely reading was a long time in coming. In Confessions, St. Augustine wrote:

When Ambrose read, his eyes moved over the pages, and his soul penetrated the meaning, without his uttering a word or moving his tongue. Many times - for no one was forbidden to enter, or announced to him - we saw him reading silently and never otherwise, and after a while we would go away, conjecturing that during the brief interval he used to refresh his spirit, free from the tumult of the business of others, he did not wish to be disturbed, for perhaps he feared that someone who was listening, hearing a difficult part of the text, might ask him to explain an obscure passage or might wish to discuss it with him, and would thus prevent him from reading as many volumes as he desired. I believe that he read that way to preserve his voice, which was easily strained. In any case, whatever the man's purpose was, it was surely a good one.

As Borges points out, St. Augustine was a disciple of St. Ambrose, Bishop of Milan around the year 384. Thirteen years later in Munidia, when he wrote his Confessions, that singular spectacle still troubled him: a man in a room, with a book, reading without articulating the words.

Even today, reading isn't wholly a visual experience. Physicians forbid patients who have undergone throat surgery to read. In Yugoslavia, an unsuccessful attempt was recently made to "mind-read" by attaching wires to vocal cords.

When Russian children in an experiment were told to keep their mouths open, they made six times as many spelling mistakes as they made normally: they couldn't "say" the words to themselves. Chinese children, whose words are pictorial rather than phonetic, aren't affected in this way. Chinese injured in the acoustic area of the brain don't lose their ability to write.

Where the letters of an alphabet closely match the phonemes or minimal sound units of a language, it's easy to teach reading, and spelling is never a problem, but speed reading is difficult: readers are slowed down by inwardly experiencing the sounds of words. Thus the lack of close correspondence between the phonemes of English & the Latin alphabet favors speed reading (though it delays reading-learning & makes spelling a problem), whereas in Spanish & Italian, where graphemes & phonemes more closely correspond, speed reading is more difficult.

Small children with reading problems are sometimes encouraged to sing-dance words as they learn to spell them. Music is widely used as background for teaching penmanship. Similarly, it was found in South Africa that the Kalahari learned more quickly to ride bicycles when a musical accompaniment was provided.

In shifting from speech to writing, man gave up an ear for an eye, and transferred his interest from spiritual to spatial, from reverential to referential. God became "The One on High," and all inner psychological states were described as outer perceptions. We said "thereafter," not the logical thenafter; "always," meaning all ways, for all times; "before," meaning in front of, for earlier. Language & perception shifted to the spatial, the observable, the seen. Chaytor, in From Script to Print, writes:

When we speak or write, ideas evoke acoustic images, combined with kinesthetic images, which are at once transferred into visual images. The speaker or writer can now hardly conceive of language except in printed and written form; the reflex actions by which the process of reading and writing is performed have become so "instinctive" and are performed with such facile rapidity, that the change from the auditory to the visual is concealed from the reader or writer, and makes analysis of it a matter of great difficulty. It may be that the acoustic and kinesthetic images are inseparable, and that "image" as such is an abstraction made for purposes of analysis, but which is non-existent considered in itself and as pure.