All of us are born with brains that are designed to think and talk.

But no one is born with a brain that is designed to read.

For that reason, every child who learns to read is adapting older brain structures to a new purpose, and "it's almost a miracle that so many kids are able to do that effortlessly."

That's one of the main messages that Dr. Maryanne Wolf, director of the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University, will deliver in a keynote address at a dyslexia conference here on Saturday.

Dr. Wolf, author of the best-selling 2007 book "Proust and the Squid: the Story and Science of the Reading Brain," will speak from 9 to 10:30 a.m. at the conference. It is sponsored by the Pittsburgh chapter of the International Dyslexia Association at the headquarters of the Allegheny Intermediate Unit in the Waterfront shopping complex in Homestead.

She said in an interview last week that fluent readers create a new reading circuit in the left half of their brains, using areas hard-wired for hearing, vision, speech, memory and cognition.

For some children, though, this task is extraordinarily difficult, and brain imaging studies have shown that many of them end up using the right half of their brains for reading tasks, even though it isn't ideally suited for that purpose.

The right brain is associated with spatial and visual skills, and it turns out that many of history's most celebrated artists, architects and outside-the-box thinkers are known to have struggled with dyslexia.

"So many great artists -- Picasso, Gaudi, Rodin, da Vinci -- were dyslexic," she said, and a British study two years ago showed that 35 percent of people who had created their own businesses described themselves as having dyslexia.

When her book was translated into Italian recently, she was given a private showing of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Last Supper" and of his collection of drawings and ideas known as the Atlantic Codex.

She was struck by his "unreal capacity to invent spatial things that didn't exist before," including plans for unusual weapons to defend a city, and she got to see firsthand his reverse mirror writing. "I couldn't believe what came out of this man's mind, and yet my favorite da Vinci quote is that when he was asked what he most longed for, he said, 'Someone to stand by me and read to me,' since reading was so hard for him."

She also knows about those tendencies in a very personal way. One of her two sons has dyslexia, but is a talented artist who is now working in Hollywood as a set designer.

"I've had the challenge and great gift of my son being dyslexic," she said, "and of seeing teachers who were most well meaning and absolutely terrible, and now I see him graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and he's in Hollywood, and I swear to God he thinks differently from me, and he's been that way for his whole life."

Even if children with dyslexia have brains that are wired differently, it is possible to teach them how to read, Dr. Wolf said, but it takes more work and knowing exactly what their decoding problem is.

Many people know that dyslexia often involves difficulty translating letters into sounds, but her research has shown that the speed of labeling is also significant.

Dr. Wolf's team has devised tests in which preschoolers and young elementary-age children are asked to look at sets of letters, numbers or colors on a page and label them aloud. Children who go on to have reading disabilities are markedly slower in being able to do that, even if their accuracy is just as good as that of children who become fluent readers.

In her book, she didn't focus just on reading difficulties, but also examined the issue of whether the new digital age that children are growing up in will dilute the value of reading.

Noting that Socrates opposed the spread of writing because he thought it would interfere with students gaining wisdom directly from teachers, Dr. Wolf said "some of the very questions Socrates raised then we should raise now."

"How do we move from a dependency on abundant and immediate information [through the Internet and other media] to develop people who are really good analyzers of that information, and have a mindset of probity and analysis and inference?"

She knows the digital age is here to stay, she said, "but I'm fighting a mindless lurch into that digital culture, and I'm fighting for the need to preserve the capacities we've honed for 2,000 years in this expert reading brain."

The local gathering, "Dyslexia Today: A Conference for Teachers and Parents," will run from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m. Saturday. For more information, check www.pbida.org/conferences-archives.asp?ID=326#577

Looking for more from the Post-Gazette? Join PG+, our members-only web site. You'll get exclusive sports content, opinion, financial information, discounts from retailers and restaurants, and more. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.