The complexities of reading

I found the evolution of how we teach people to read very interesting in this article. It seems that the we have a general idea of what are the individual important part involved. The include, but are not limited to; learning the alphabet and connecting the sounds to individual letter, piecing together these letter to for phonemes, recognizing words and their meanings, and interpreting when all of this comes together into a sentence. I thought that this quote really explained just how complex reading really is,

"Instead, all of the processes within are simultaneously active and interactive, with every awakened cluster of knowledge and understanding at once both issuing and accommodating information, both passing and receiving guidance, to and from every other."

As I was reading I began to think about how I don't really even look at the individual letter, I only see the words themselves, internally saying them "out loud" to myself. While some may speak of reading as if it is a simple mechanical skill, they don't take into account just how many things the human brain is doing all at once to understand the visual representation of language.