Shades of Déjerine--forging a causal link between the visual word form area and reading.

In 1892, the French neurologist Jules Déjerine suggested that pure alexia resulted from an occipital lesion that selectively disconnected visual input from a region of the brain that housed "optical images of words." In this issue of Neuron, Gaillard and colleagues offer evidence consistent with Déjerine's proposal and provide new insights to the functional role of the "visual word form area."