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How Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain

How Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain

Last updated on: January 23, 2025 at 11:03 am by Gene Veith

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How Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain 2025-01-23T11:03:51-05:00 Gene Veith

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Being able to read, says a scientist, has rewired the human brain. And the person responsible for that, he says, is Martin Luther.

I randomly came across this:

Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area in your left ventral occipital temporal region, shifted facial recognition into your right hemisphere, reduced your inclination toward holistic visual processing, increased your verbal memory, and thickened your corpus callosum, which is the information highway that connects the left and right hemispheres of your brain.

What accounts for these neurological and psychological changes?

You are likely highly literate. As you learned to read, probably as a child, your brain reorganized itself to better accommodate your efforts, which had both functional and inadvertent consequences for your mind.

And what was responsible for that? The better question, who was responsible? And the answer that accounts for this major rewiring of the human brain is MARTIN LUTHER!

So says Harvard evolutionary biologist (!) Joseph Heinrich in Nautilus, a site that relates science to art and culture. His article, published in 2021, is entitled Martin Luther Rewired Your Brain, with the deck, “How mass literacy, spurred by Protestantism, reconfigured our neural pathways.”

Reading, of course, goes back for thousands of years. But, observes Heinrich, in all of that time, only a tiny percentage of people actually knew how to read. The notion that everyone should learn how to read came not from the scientific intelligentsia of the Enlightenment, nor from the economic growth of the 19th century.

No, it was a religious mutation in the 16th century. After bubbling up periodically in prior centuries, the belief that every person should read and interpret the Bible for themselves began to rapidly diffuse across Europe with the eruption of the Protestant Reformation, marked in 1517 by Martin Luther’s delivery of his famous 95 theses. Protestants came to believe that both boys and girls had to study the Bible for themselves to better know their God. In the wake of the spread of Protestantism, the literacy rates in the newly reforming populations in Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands surged past more cosmopolitan places like Italy and France. Motivated by eternal salvation, parents and leaders made sure the children learned to read.

Heinrich then cites historical studies that found that literacy and schooling rates in 19th century Germany were much higher in Protestant counties than in Catholic counties. This phenomenon can even be seen today in Africa and India, where the areas with Protestant missions have higher literacy and schooling rates than the areas with Catholic missions. The exception is Catholic Jesuit missions, which Heinrich says imitated the Protestant emphasis on education as part of the Counter-Reformation. Areas close to Jesuit missions have shown higher rates of literacy than those close to Franciscan missions.

But what led to the push for universal, public education? Heinrich credits Luther for that too:

The notion of universal, state-funded schooling has its roots in religious ideals. As early as 1524, Martin Luther not only emphasized the need for parents to ensure their children’s literacy but also placed the responsibility for creating schools on secular governments. This religiously inspired drive for public schools helped make Prussia a model for public education, which was later copied by countries like Britain and the United States.

So if you can read, whatever your religious beliefs or lack of them, thank Martin Luther. And you might try using your rewired brain to read some of the reading material he made available, such as the Bible in your own language, and that he himself wrote. (A good place to start is this.)

This article makes me wonder, if reading rewired our brains, are online screens also rewiring our brains? Though much of what we do online still involves reading and writing, electronic images–with the coming together of television and computers–are ascending. The pioneering media scholar Marshall McLuhan, a devout Catholic, wrote about the different mindsets created by images and the written word. If computers are rewiring our brains, will we someday be unable to read? Literacy is already said to be declining among the young. I want to stop thinking about this. . . .I think I’ll watch some streaming.

Photo: Martin Luther Monument, St. Mary Church, Berlin by Reinhard Kraasch, Lizenz: CC-BY-SA 4.0 DE, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

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