Reading and writing are not purely mechanical processes because they manifest, throughout history, changes in mentality in which the progress of cognitive abilities involved  To understand the function of reading and writing have to go back to basics. At some point in the evolution of writing systems, writing began to keep and fix verb forms through space and time. But the magic of writing is not so much of their ability to memorize, but its epistemological function. Not only read texts, but we found them changing mindsets. In writing and reading is at stake than the alphabet, as it always is decoded and capture a "plus" in that world on paper.  Through analysis of the passage of primitive influenced by the writing of the changes of mentality produced in the two great cultural revolutions, that of classical Greece and the Renaissance and Protestantism and other significant historical stages thinking thinking, He shows how the attempt to represent the world on paper modified the structure of knowledge throughout history.  Throughout this exciting study, David Olson raises very important issues such as the delimitation between the functions of text and reader in the transmission of content, the various ways of reading texts throughout history and evolution the way to deal with this "more" than the text contains and which, however, is not clear or even lost in the letters themselves. A central conclusion of this work is that the text provides a model of language and we perceive our language in the categories set writing. Therefore, the script determines our whole thinking process. "The whole history of cultural and conceptual changes discussed in this book is, at heart, a theory of reading" (Olson). The world on paper innovatively can establish the connection between cognitive science, linguistics and history of culture