Dyslexia: What’s up with that?

Ground Up Think Tank
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Soooo…I had an interesting interaction with a kid with dyslexia the other day.

He was looking over a 40 page legal document trying to find his name.

Dude, you should try the copy I was reading last night!!

He did. Said it was much easier. Handing him my glasses so he was holding the page much closer than normal made it even easier…

The copy I was referencing had been printed past the ink/toner capacity of the printer. It got more and more faded as the document progressed, but it was a gradient across the page, with only the ends of the lines printed at full opacity.

Kid could read it with ease!!! Except at the ends of the lines.

It appeared as if the greyscale gradient (vertical & horizontal) worked as a guide to keep all the pieces in the right order….

Except at the ends of the lines, where the letters above and below were the same shade as the “correct” ones…

I haven’t gotten around to duplicating this deliberately, but if his experience can be duplicated, a simple hand held overlay might make reading easier for those of us with hyper acute tiger spotting skills (shuffle the stripes till you spot the tiger).

My wife the special Ed teacher wants to use color (read the :rainbow:), but my guess is too many colors will make it worse not better.

Anyone wanna give it a go?

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When my son was tested they explained different background colors and font styles can help a lot with those experiencing Dyslexia. That was just one of the many ways explained to help overcome obstacles with that condition. Very interesting!

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I heard somewhere a long time ago that they apparently they have fonts that put the center of gravity of each letter lower so that it gives each letter “weight” that is supposed to “ground” it to keep it from moving in your mind. Kinda sounds like what the grid pattern is doing in your case.

I too have slysdexia, and have to read numbers (especially with decimals) way too many times. I bout lost 3k not too long ago by dyslexing the account number for an ACH payment (my damn bank doesn’t allow copy/paste for acct numbers for ACH payments). Shits real, man!

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This was part of a longer video, but I wasn’t able to find it. I was diagnosed with dyslexia ( and dysgraphia) my jr year of highschool and I can say this is a pretty accurate depiction

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Dyslexia doesn’t mean bad pattern recognition.

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brain goes zooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooom
I imagine things that help establish better focus create better reading…
but for me it’s more about getting mords wixed up in conversation

I think it has a lot to do with the “Symptoms such as information-processing speed challenges”

I sometimes have the symptoms but not the diagnosis.

Dyslexia and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are different brain disorders, but they often overlap. About 3 in 10 people with dyslexia also have ADHD, making them six times more likely to have a mental illness or a learning disorder such as dyslexia.1 Symptoms such as information-processing speed challenges, working memory deficits, naming speed and motor skills deficits can be easily mistaken for those associated with ADHD.0 If a person has both conditions it means they have broad executive function impairments (problems focusing, using working memory etc.), as well as an impairment of the particular skills needed for reading.

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No it doesn’t.

Show me where I said it did.

It looks to me to be a “shuffling to see patterns” spectrum.

But that’s just based on my interaction with my son and his description.

Our brains were not evolved to read squiggles on a page, the pattern of a tiger in the grass probably requires moving the bits around to get it right at an acceptable rate is my working hypothesis.

I’m assuming you have dyslexia of some flavor. Educate me. Please

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image
There is plenty of info in medical text!

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You got a link? Pretty sure these things don’t come with manuals.

if you know better then by all means share it with the class…

What is or was the evolutionary advantage?

Because the incidence would be much lower if there were not a selective advantage one at some point.

Which @TheGooMan was what I was trying to explore. How was this helpful?

What would be the evolutionary advantage of swapping out background colors or moving elements around?!?

To enhance the recognition of “it’s gonna eat me” would be my best guess.

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Just was sharing the picture you sent to my post. Its lame rigjt? Bitch boy shit? Yeah. Medical reviews and journals are your friend!

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Reading, writing, grammer is all training, functional deficits are gonna happen, I know artists that can’t write a decent sentence, but can create wonderous worlds with simple tools.

Dyslexia is not a disadvantage or advantage, each persons mind is wired differently to recognize and correlate patterns in various ways, which is why a dyslexic may fumble in verbal and written language, but have the capacity to visualize various things in great detail.

I have mild dyslexia, it manifests in small silly ways, re-reading lines, misplacing the order of letters, learning to read later than my peers.

I have to see words as “functional” so to speak, and actually try to visualize my sentence structure as to ensure proper placement.

How is it helpful?

This old saying I think sums it up well. “What’s good for the gander, isnt always good for the goose.”

Its just a different mental cycle that has enough of a place within the gene pool to make it a viable enough process, and we have tools and roles within society to successfully nurture it.

Its not a “fault” it’s not a “problem”, just like most mental cycles, it just takes the proper stimulation, and response from the environment to create synchronization to allow the individual to flourish.

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you don’t see how changing the background color while looking for tigers might have been an advantage?

It looks like one to me

I get the impression all you’re hearing me say is “defect”. Which I’m pretty sure I haven’t said.

It may not currently be an advantage, but there is something to the phenomenon that was selected for.

Wrapping our heads around what the advantage was seems like a decent start to removing the stigma associated with “can’t read, words keep moving”.

Eg: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.889245/full

“[T]he question we need to be asking is not what’s wrong with the dyslexic brain, but what is dyslexic cognition for, what are these brains really built to do?.”

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I give you that making fun of folks for not reading is lame in a dyslexia thread…

Making light of “but dude, you were handed the damn instructions…” is a slightly different critter.

…and by all means ignore the fact that @thesk8nmidget may not have posted that link for you if I had not bought up the mod we had just done on our pump and noted that I could not locate the addendum to the fine manual that you needed.

If you’d actually posted links to relevant medical texts on the subject, that either supported or did not support my thesis, and I failed to read them before asking you what they said, we would have an equivalent situation.

So yeah, you’re spot on in your characterization.

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Glad to know your intent was to make fun of me. Noted! Hopefully i get a chance to run into you one of these fine days.

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:kissing_closed_eyes:

Intent was to help you…first by making you aware of the problem, then by making sure you remembered the “fuck, I didn’t read!”

if you can’t laugh at the fact that you were handed the instructions you needed, and you missed them, that’s ok.

As @TheGooMan pointed out, this is a team sport. You got two assists and you’re pissed…I’ll be sure not to send the ball your way again.

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It’s not that im trying to hone in on deficit vs. assets either. All im saying is it isn’t either because there’s always going to be implicit bias outside of that thought pattern.

Look at the people with the thought pattern you’re trying to understand, their action, and capacities will tell you.

Dyslexics are generally good at pattern recognition, visual thinking, drawing conclusions from loose data, etc.

Their brains are trained to see patterns in a different manner than standardized education generally works with.

They don’t see an “A”, they see the shape of it, and correlate what they understand an “A” to be with that shape, and there’s a host of other shapes that produce corresponding sounds with, you’re just seeing the process of pattern recognition at work as the person decyphers it.

So yes, having different representations for the shape of it can be advantageous to the person who has dyslexia, or even having it in a way that they have to analyze the patterns more to “get it”.

How is it an advantage? Depends on circumstances, as you stated, it might help the “spot the tiger”, it also might have helped in tool making, hell, it might have helped in assigning shapes to language, there’s a litany of places it could have been useful. Its just another way the brain works, if you have it the best thing you could possibly do, is work with it, because, it does have advantages when stacked up against normative functioning, but you have to make it to your advantage, square peg in a round hole and all that.

I do hope anything we get at here is helpful. As you seem to be a concerned parent just worried about why his kiddo has these patterns, so I do hope we can derive something here.

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Not a much trained, as wired…but yeah.

“Training” absolutely happens, but understanding the underlying process and using it makes more sense than trying to “fix” it.

I’ve got a single example I’ve been watching for much of the last 20 years…

Handing him something I found very difficult to read, and discovering that he had less trouble was an eye opener.

For both of us.

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I don’t believe in a “hard wired” unless genetically predisposed.

The idea of synaptic pruning I believe applies to Dyslexia, its just a way that the brain had to interpret and take in data, and learned to do so.

Which I agree with you 1000%

“Training” absolutely happens, but understanding the underlying process and using it makes more sense than trying to “fix” it.”

Which is what I addressed in my previous reply, its not a dysfunction. it’s just a different pattern recognition.

I believe dyslexia is just a way the human mind takes a stab at the problem of pattern recognition, and there’s so many ways for it to do so, so its just best to be aware of as many different ways the mind can do that, so we can tailor better learning practices to these people.

Coming from someone who has certainly had to learn and train myself around “whats wrong with me?” To realizing it can be a superpower, just depends on context.

You know, now im curious if theres a genetic marker or not.

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My training says there has to be…

Turns out “reading” is pretty much 50:50 nature:nurture.

One of the strongest risk factors for dyslexia is having a close relative with reading problems, ie having a family history of dyslexia. Comparing identical and nonidentical twins has shown that your genes account for about half your reading skills and upbringing and environment the other half (ie the heritability of dyslexia is c. 50%).
https://www.dyslexic.org.uk/genetics-of-dyslexia

Haz neural network with x,y, & z built in properties. How you train it will absolutely affect how effective it is at any particular task….as will the initial constraints on connectivity and interaction.

For the longest time, my working hypothesis was the tv as baby sitter between 2 & 5yrs old (which is when I first met him) was the underlying “cause”. A period when I had the advantage of a nuclear physicist running flash cards to get me up to speed while the networks were at their most plastic.

Discovering that the stoner act he used as a cover in high school wasn’t actually an act (his younger brother was making edibles and dosing him on a regular basis) has helped him come to terms with his whirled.

Being able to frame something that he has long seen as a deficit as a strength would help even more

I’m sure Dr Spock said that in the fine manual somewhere.

Gotta admit I never read it. Glad the nuclear physicist and his beau did…

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To me being a dyslexic was a deficit, until I was proven capable in other areas outside of the standard molds I didn’t fit. Once given platform and opportunity to shine outside of the standard models around me, once I could show people and myself something, I had proof of capability, capability is key to understanding that you are NOT a deficit.

Keep doing the good dadding and try to understand, he’ll surprise you more than that paper he happened to read, if nurtured correctly, he’s got capabilites that’ll help him see things differently than most, and that is where the greatest surprises are had.

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