Rooms for letters

"Writing, a cultural tool, has evolved to make use of the inferotemporal neurons'preference for certain shapes. «Letter shape,», Dehaene writes, «is not an arbitrary cultural choice. The brain constrains the design of an efficient writing system so severely that there is little room for cultural relativism. Our primate brain only accepts a limited set of written shapes."

Oliver Sacks, in A Man of letters, The New Yorker, June 28, 2010.