Dyslexia

How can you detect someone who has dyslexia?

As mentioned above, dyslexia manifests in varying degrees of difficulty in learning with words. Therefore, dyslexia symptoms can be mild to severe and no individual will experience the same symptoms.

Often, people with dyslexia process information differently and are more visual in learning. Dyslexia is not limited to literary problems and can involve organisation of thought.

Dyslexia is often accompanied by strengths in other areas such as creative work, storytelling, sales, building and engineering.

Symptoms

(It is also important to note that mistakes and symptoms increase dramatically with confusion, time pressure and emotional distress, or poor health.)
• Difficulties with spelling, writing and reading caused by confusion with letters, numbers, words, sequences, or verbal explanations.
• Reading or writing shows repetitions, additions, transpositions, omissions, substitutions, and reversals in letters, numbers and/or words.
• Spells phonetically and inconsistently.
• Initially has trouble or still has trouble with sight words (eg was, what, is, the).
• Difficulty catching on to phonics or sounding out words. Mispronouncing words.
• Tends to confuse words that look alike (eg was/saw, for/from, who, how, house/home).
• Mis-reads or omits small words (for, of, with an, it) and word endings (-ing, -ed, -ly, -s).
• Feeling or seeing non-existent movement while reading, writing, or copying. This can result in a fumbling of words (eg reading a road sign ‘cross with caution’ as ‘caution with cross’ and mixing up the progression of other phrases)
• Seems to have difficulty with vision, yet eye exams don't reveal a problem.
• Reads and rereads with little comprehension.
• Developing headaches, dizziness or stomach aches after or during periods of reading.
• Short attention span due to difficulty with focusing on words and processing information in a literary style. Seems ‘hyper’ or ‘daydreamer’. Easily loses track of time.
• Test well orally, but not as well in written tests. Difficulty putting thoughts into words verbally or in writing.
• Poor short term working memory.
• Sometimes have poor sense of direction, coordination and balance. Clumsy.

Talents and aptitudes associated with dyslexia

Whilst people with dyslexia are less incline to excel in language and linguistic fields of expertise, dyslexic people are highly creative, intuitive, and excel at three-dimensional problem solving and hands-on learning.

The discovery of such talents inevitably raises questions about whether these faculties translate into real-life skills. Although people with dyslexia are found in every profession, including law, medicine and science, observers have long noted that they populate fields like art and design in unusually high numbers.

Dyslexic people are also said to excel in visually intensive branches of science, engineering and other fields requiring a high level of spatial ability.

There is an interesting article published on 4 February 2012 in The New York Times about the upside of dyslexia. Here is an extract:

Gadi Geiger and Jerome Lettvin, cognitive scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, used a mechanical shutter, called a tachistoscope, to briefly flash a row of letters extending from the center of a subject’s field of vision out to its perimeter. Typical readers identified the letters in the middle of the row with greater accuracy. Those with dyslexia triumphed, however, when asked to identify letters located in the row’s outer reaches.

Mr. Geiger and Mr. Lettvin’s findings, which have been confirmed in several subsequent studies, provide a striking demonstration of the fact that the brain separately processes information that streams from the central and the peripheral areas of the visual field. Moreover, these capacities appear to trade off: if you’re adept at focusing on details located in the center of the visual field, which is key to reading, you’re likely to be less proficient at recognizing features and patterns in the broad regions of the periphery.

The opposite is also the case. People with dyslexia, who have a bias in favor of the visual periphery, can rapidly take in a scene as a whole — what researchers call absorbing the “visual gist.”

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