What makes Lisp difficult to read?

Lisp's parenthesis-heavy syntax is widely perceived as less readable than languages like Python or Java, and while programmers often attribute this to unfamiliarity, the author argues there are deeper cognitive reasons rooted in how humans parse information. The author explores how the placement of parentheses in Lisp's prefix notation—where the operation comes before arguments in the form (operation arguments...)—requires more cognitive effort compared to infix notation like operation(arguments...), drawing on principles from cognitive science like the Stroop effect to explain why certain syntactic choices are inherently harder to process.