Dyslexia
geon.github.io
geon.github.io
I simply can't tell the difference between symbols that have been rotated or reversed. So I made it through an engineering degree with "the alligator eats the bigger number" mnemonics for > and <.
The first thing I do when I get a new dev machine is take a pen and write "\r\n" up above the delete key. I've never gotten the slashes in the right direction on that key sequence from memory even though I type them several times a day (I just had to edit my post after looking it up right now and realizing I'd typed it wrong on my new laptop).
Anything that can be reversed, I reverse roughly 50% of the time. Because to my brain, they're interchangeable.
Do you use some special fonts that help with symbols such as > and <, b and d and so on?
- Do you have problems disambiguating P and d?
- Do you have problems disambiguating d and b?
If I have an external visual queue I can use, I'm good to go. That's what made the >< thing work. I got the intersection/union symbols down because union happens to both look like and start with a U.
If you ever stare at a single word it's never muddled or back to front, but when you scan a sentence and think back over what you have seen words may be in different orders, perhaps based on a typical grouping for those words.
For example if you scanned over your comment, it could come out as, "it does mix dynamical while reading". "It does" and your typo being corrected.
Try staring at a group of 5-6 words quickly, close your eyes, visualize them and read them back.
For me it's like there is a limited buffer, so when I parse a sentence and then read it back in context the start may have become corrupted.
For left-handed people, it's a bit more complicated.
Not so complicated.
I mean, I never really thought about it, but that's how I "know" which is slash forward and which is backslash.
/ forward slash
\ backward slash
[0] https://static.fjcdn.com/pictures/Slash_066306_2216065.jpg
For me, it's any arbitrary, binary, convention. Left and right. Clockwise and counterclockwise. \ and /. Whether time zone offsets are added or subtracted from the UTC time. Interestingly, < and > never gave me a problem, perhaps because I've internalized the alligator mnemonic you mentioned.
Mixing up my p's and q's, and my b's and d's were a big problem when I was young but I luckily grew out of that since they were considering putting me into remedial education because of it.
I also find I've developed a lot of my own pneumonics. So for > and < I know that the converging side is narrow and therefore it is the lesser side, the divering side is broad and as such is the greater side. Or as someone from the west coast of an island - I figure out east and west by imaging my country knowing that I'm on the west coast.
Funnily enough north/south or up/down don't cause me trouble. It's only things that have vertical symmetry or that can rotate that confuse me.
I mean, I thought it was just like the article, but if it's also confounding directions (sometimes I have to think about left and right, I sometimes think that California is on the east coast, I make a mess with clockwise/counterclockwise) then I have that problem too.
Almost 10 years in the states and I still have to think before every single git commit.
Source: I'm Portuguese.
mnemonics :P
I don't understand this at all. The bigger number is at the bigger end, that's the whole point of the symbols. What does the alligator introduce, apart from an extra step and doubt over whether it's larger or smaller numbers they are said to eat?
It probably has to do with how it was taught. I was never taught "the bigger number is at the bigger end", it was simply "> means greater than and < means less than" and we were supposed to memorize that. The alligator mneumonic is just a way of recovering the original meaning.
For an accessible but informative intro-level text, I recommend _Psychology of Reading_, by Rayner, Pollatsek, Ashby, and Clifton. (I took intro grad-level cognitive psychology from Rayner and Pollatsek.) One anecdote I remember from the first edition involved a subject who couldn't perform left-to-right saccades; she was dyslexic in English, but wouldn't have been in Hebrew or Arabic.
"Different dyslexics have different symptoms and experiences depending on what part of the pipeline is affected how"
One student that I worked with a couple of years ago talked of the words jumping and changing size on the stark white page. She had lilac coloured paper for handouts &c.
OA has been added to my teacher-training list of pages.
I describe it like reading through a straw. I can only focus on one word at a time, while most people can take in more words at once. Consequently, my reading speed is much slower than most. Oddly, it hasn't affected my ability to code; I can "see" code just fine.
Just out of interest, does it change by programming language? I imagine all the "structural support" in most popular programming languages would be helpful, but I know very little about dyslexia...
Given the representation, I'm not surprised --- a lot of people, including those non-dyslexic, read code very differently from how they read prose: by focusing on tiny sections at a time. I'd guess that if you tried to read code the way you read prose, by trying to see big chunks of it at a time, you'd quickly experience the same feeling.
Often, key letters will just completely disappear. In their place is...a kind of grey blank that your mind jumps over. You could swear there's something there, and you can see it when you move your eyes quickly across the word, or out of the corner of your eye when you read the previous or next word, but it disappears when you steady your eyes on that word.
This could be a freaky/fun thing to do as a VR demo.
Or one of the eye tracking kits.
My aura was similar to their description. I would be reading, and the words before or after the current one would be gone. I figured it was the migraine disrupting the visual processing parts of the brain so much so that the automatic filling in of the blind spot stopped working.
I realize there are people experiencing migraines and other painful experiences, but if you have occasional "I can't see right / my head hurts" experiences, consider seeing if drinking a lot more water helps. ;)
It's also related to that optical illusion with the cross and circle, where one seems to vanish when you stare at the other.
"migraine flash" might be "potential serious brain issue", I would pay close attention if you've got low/high blood pressures, abnormal blood, obese/anorexic.
Disclaimer: I'm not a medical professional, but I wouldn't play off something like this.
Unless brain damage was done, it's quite likely you can train yourself out of this habit by the way. One method I heard that works is to wear an elastic band, whenever you do it twang yourself on the wrist.
I had to "concentrate" in-order to understand each letter, something I don't have to do with normal text. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to constantly have to read everything like that.
Also, while most words were easy to make out, the ones that I don't use in everyday life; like "Typoglycemia" were impossible to figure out. I had to check what it was linked to.
I play a videogame where there is a character named "Medivh" (pronounced ma-deev). Even knowing that, even having played that character for over a year, I still read it as med-va.
And a lot of words are like that, I'll be reading along and hit a word like constantly and read it as "consistently" even though it doesn't make sense, then get confused and need to re-read. Or like in your second sentence I read "concrete-trate" and had to reread it to make sense of the word.
Just wondering - do fonts like https://opendyslexic.org/ make it easier for you to read?
For me I don't think it's a visual thing, it happens regardless of font, size, or how easy it is to see at the moment.
Over the years the words have stopped jumping around less which is nice. However I still look at new words and have absolutely no idea how to pronounce them.
I think my dyslexia is very much routed in how sounds link to the glyphs, when I see a word like Typoglycemia I have to specifically recall from memory the sound that "glyce" make, it's not intuitive to me, it's entirely the fact that I've memorised it and sometimes that can take quite a while to recall.
Everyones is slightly different, my handwriting looks like I've never used a pen before, it's really quite funny sometimes.
Hope that sheds a bit of light on my experiences with it!
In essence, it would take them a lot longer (or at a higher cognitive tax) to intemperate a page of text.
"a pattern of learning difficulties characterized by problems with accurate or fluent word recognition, poor decoding, and poor spelling abilities."
The way to describe my experience is that when you read sentences, you are sometimes surprised by what you read because it seems wrong, re-read it and find out that's not what it said at all. The correction I might possibly make on this site would be to have webcam input and change only when your eyes are not looking at something and to make the change more subtle so you're not aware of it in your peripheral vision.
Day-to-day (not big) issues are:
* Having to re-read paragraphs because I read it wrong and therefore failed to understand it. * Coming unstuck in a point I'm making because I failed to read the text correctly. * Some fonts I really cannot read at any speed - basically if it differs too much from very standard computer fonts. * Given up writing lowercase in my own handwriting because I cannot easily read it - the workaround for me was to write completely in capitals. * Generally wanting to avoid reading because of the above issues.
Benefits:
* Able to spot mistakes in large bodies of text really quickly, but equally could be a result of just being a programmer. * Skim reading is easier because I have gotten used to getting words in the wrong order anyway, which almost the same as missing words.
Also, I find it funny that one test for whether you are dreaming is reading sentences in your dream doesn't make sense - I get this anyway :) Proof we are living in the matrix? ;)
Interested to hear if anybody else also experiences this and can even enlighten me a bit.
As a child I had a pretty severe stutter which is not as pronounced now, and the feeling I got from that is the same feeling I get now as an adult with my reading.
I've not experienced the dream one, at least in any way that I can remember. I tend not to dream in general however.
And just like your second bullet point, on several occasions I've approved written material that was quite poor because my brain filled in the blanks with what I thought sounded nice :)
I had a pretty bad stutter at one point, not mid-words but just repeating a word out of order over and over. For example, when trying to say "today", I used to say "Day day day today". People would find it funny, but actually I had no control at all. It took years to train myself out of this habit.
>I've not experienced the dream one, at least in any way that I can remember. I tend not to dream in general however.
The dream was a joke :) It's about telling whether you are dreaming or not, the joke being that because of the way I read sentences I couldn't tell anyway.
>And just like your second bullet point, on several occasions I've approved written material that was quite poor because my brain filled in the blanks with what I thought sounded nice :)
This sometimes works in my favour, I'm able to bridge gaps when people don't write enough information. Equally, sometimes when dictating my own ideas I sometimes miss words or entire sentences despite actually thinking them up and going to type them.
* being more polite and kind after you found yourself few times in the middle of "hot" conversation simply because you misread something at the start.
I don't think it is much dyslexia, because this happened to me while in rush to think and make a point instead of reading it and think. I also tend to skip paragraphs or entire pages while reading books, if my mind is busy enough thinking of the last read sentence.
>reading sentences in your dream
Try to raise hands and look at fingers in your dream :)
For sure, although being passionate about a topic doesn't seem to hold me back :)
>I don't think it is much dyslexia, because this happened to me while in rush to think and make a point instead of reading it and think. I also tend to skip paragraphs or entire pages while reading books, if my mind is busy enough thinking of the last read sentence.
For me, this happens regardless. Admittedly not all the time, but often enough that people have come to expect it of me.
>Try to raise hands and look at fingers in your dream :)
That sounds like something someone in the Matrix would say ;)
While I suspect in the end I can understand the dyslexic text just as well as a normal one, reading this required significantly higher concentration and was much slower.
If you know the words, then reading is easy. But I can see how it can seriously disturb the process of learning new or difficult words.
You may have read it, but you didn't understand it!
The original one was something like: "Try to read it". That's pretty much it.
One other benefit of OpenDyslexic is that it is a very "heavy" font. If you're struggling to read something in Helvetica Neue, switching to any heavier font would make it easier to read.
If anyone wants to check it out that would be awesome.
On the subject, my dad and I are dyslexic, and this course (in a different form) has helped immeasurably. We also have a couple of experts on the subject area that I can put anyone in touch with if they have any questions, please reach out info@unitsofsound.com
But now and then - maybe once a month, maybe a few days in a row, some normal, easy, word will look _wrong_.
The letters don't "jump around", but it looks wrong the way a missplelled word does...I end up staring at it and trying to imagine how it SHOULD be spelled. That'd be less weird for me if it was a word with lots of typical english weirdness, like "necessary", but this happens on really _simple_ words, and usually just one word at any moment. Then later, that particular word stops doing it.
In recent history I can recall this happening with: "tree", "the", "matter", and (ironically) "simple", but I've never noticed any pattern to which words do it, and these are words that only do this for a few minutes or hours, then stop. "the" just looked as wrong as "teh" normally looks wrong, and every instance on the page looks like a glaring error until it subsides.
Does anyone know what does this? It's not a notable problem for me - because these are simple words that I have a lot of familiarity with I can just logically override the emotional component, but it still weirds me out. What else can my brain do this with, making something normal and mundane wrong and alien for a brief period?
FWIW, English is my native language.
Some neuron died, and it takes a while for the RAID 5 of the mind to rebuild the array.
I'm only half-joking. I know exactly the feeling you're talking about, and it's the just-so reason I came up with to amuse myself. Realistically, it probably a relative of semantic satiation.
But seriously, thanks. Just knowing my crazy isn't unique is comforting. Plus, any day that I get to see "See also: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo" as a serious entry in Wikipedia is not a terrible day.
Between this and someone telling me about https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amygdala_hijack I'm starting to feel almost normal.
In the US, unfortunately, many experts focus exclusively on the phonological aspects of dyslexia (which corresponds to the "auditory" description above). In other parts of the world, the understanding is broader and includes visual aspects also.
It seems that the narrower, U.S.-based conception of dyslexia goes back to some research done at Yale in 1996 [1], which is often summarized as "dyslexia is phonological, not visual". Because Americans have such a high opinion of Yale, educators/experts here like to parrot this sound bite, even if they don't fully understand the research or competing research conclusions. Researchers and experts outside the U.S. have a different view (and IMO are less influenced by a research report from Yale).
I have been especially curious about the visual impacts of dyslexia, because the technology I work [2] on is visual, and according to many people with dyslexia, it is extraordinarily helpful for them. Having heard repeatedly that "dyslexia is not visual", I was curious to know why a visual technology would have a materially beneficial effect for readers with dyslexia.
In conversations with dyslexia researchers, I have learned that there may be second-order effects of dyslexia that are visual — even if the root causes of dyslexia are not visual. Basically, people with dyslexia dislike reading and therefore do not read much. This causes them to lag on a number of reading-related skills, including visual tracking. Since visual aids can improve visual tracking, they can help readers with dyslexia, even if they don't have a type of dyslexia that was originally caused by visual differences.
You just might have felt how some dyslectics feel.
Clearly, if it's real it's mild, and not much of a disability. Still:
-- It took me several years after I learned to read to stop mixing up letters and their reversed forms (e.g. lower-case b/d). -- I still have to think hard to avoid mixing up east/west in many map-reading situations. -- (Don't know if this is relevant) I always have had great difficulty identifying the direction a sound is coming from.
I also generally have difficulty memorizing visual details, recognizing faces, etc.
cf.: https://twitter.com/1990sLinuxUser/status/97350916902105089
;)
My symptoms only present themselves during production or consumption. I have no confusion between left and right in my head, I rarely get them mixed up. But it took me forever to be able to tell people which word connected to which side.
Weirdest thing - I can read that website pretty easily. I can see the words. I think it's because I look for more markers than just the word shape when I read. I don't know. How do others find it?
I really enjoyed meeting a bunch of other dyslexic folks and I'd never really met any others. Bets part of a NED meeting is no one will ask you to take notes :)
I have dyslexia and have never seen text like that.
I have no trouble seeing letters or words, I just can't associate the sounds with the letters, so I can't spell or read new words (based on the sounds).
I've dealt with it by remembering tons of words.
Also: it tames my pseudo ADHD and helps me focus a lot. I'm tempted to have this for all text.
Read the back-and-forth about the definition of bravery, from “Ben Tarr” and the rest of the commenters.
Basically - you leave first and last letters of the word where they are, and mix all other characters randomly at random times.
Able rightly, etc.
[0]https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/8628/is-it-true-...