The brain's ability to facilitate functions that it was not "designed"
to perform is demonstrated with our ability to read and write,
a human-developed skill in use for only about 5,000 years.
Guinevere Eden, professor at Georgetown University states: "That's not long enough for our brains to evolve certain regions just for that purpose. We're probably using a whole network of areas in the brain that were originally designed to do something slightly different."
Source: Time magazine; July 28, 2003