There's an additional layer of challenge where numbers are involved; with words, there are spellings that are obviously not words, or words that don't make sense in a given sentence. With numbers, there's no easy way for your brain to check whether what you read is accurate, because there's no equivalent of numbers not making sense.
For example, if I'm given a reading passage, I can accurately answer questions about it. But once those are put in A/B/C/D or 1/2/3/4 options, I will absolutely mess them up. I will know the answer is A, I will put my pencil down on the A bubble, I will fill in A, then later on I'll see that somehow I filled in C.
I had this problem a lot on tests and thought that maybe I was just being dumb and not having the correct answer, since usually you only get a scantron sheet back with zero context. About 3 years ago I started doing practice tests for language learning, of which many questions were multiple choice. I'd write the full answer for extra practice, finish the test, wait a couple minutes, then go back and check my answers. The written part of the answer would match up most of the time. The letter/number preceding it was wrong 1/4 of the time.
I've also had it with math exams a few times, where I mix up digits usually around decimal points. Sometimes it even happens when coding and those are really tough problems to debug.
I'm also terrible at holding numbers in my head, if I do not keep paying conscious attention to it, they get reversed or substituted. I remember all my PIN's by the motion you used to input them instead of the number itself.
Programming made me discover how much I love math, but I still miss a lot of basics because I never 'got it' in elementary school, and thus ended up in the lowest levels of math in highschool, where it was extremely boring and tedious (because it was actually way to easy), I wish I could send a programming book/numberphile videos to my 12-year-old self, because I think I could have ended up using high-school time way more effectively, instead of just going through the motions.
In school, I’d think I’d be doing great on my math problems. When I’d get my work back, I did terrible because I’d accidentally change the numbers in the middle of the problem. I also always had a feeling that I missed some foundational information because nothing ever clicked for me. I put it down to switching schools a few times, but I think it may have been something more than that now. I was actually scared to even try programming because I was always told you need to be good at math, so I thought I would fail terribly.
This is a huge problem for me too, but I take solace in the observation that that isn't _math_, that's _arithmetic_.
If not, there exists specific training that helps a significant fraction of people to get better at handling the actual numbers, training which also is completely unrelated to maths.
While my improvement after 30min a day for a couple of weeks was something of an aberration in magnitude (from 70"th percentile to 110'th, from well below average to above), it was reportedly quite consistent in increasing recall percentile with ~10% as measured against the general population. Which especially at lower percentiles is quite impressive!
It's not really realated, but to me the whole thing was quite a strange experience! After roughly a week of daily practice, it suddenly felt like I found a part of my brain I didn't even know existed. I could suddenly pick numbers, or sequences of "lights" turning on on the screen, seemingly from nothing! The first times it happened I didn't really remember the sequence, I only knew which button to push, but after a little more practice I started to be able to consciously recall the sequence from this new place in my mind.
It was truly stunning to be suddenly able to look at a code at the car wash, and sometimes remember it for hours afterwards!
Me, who several times had forgotten my card pin, who though I loved and was good at maths had to read digit by digit to get the numbers right (and often still didn't), and who had in general tended to permute any kind of number more often than not for the ~30 years I had known what numbers were!
The brain is so strange sometimes.
can you describe the treatment protocol to us in brief or link us to additional resources on this topic? this sounds very interesting and potentially very helpful.
My whole life I’ve been swapping 2 and 5. Or I go to write 6 and 5 comes out. Stuff like that.
Only numbers tho. Letters are fine.
One trick I’ve found when checking numbers is to compare them both forwards and backwards as a sort of checksum. This has become less of an issue now that you can almost always copypaste but still comes handy
But when it comes to writing its a different ballgame. With a computer its not so tricky (and its easy to hide... hello backspace), but with a pen and paper I make mistakes all time. After many years of practice I am fairly used to taking my time and making sure I spell properly now, but I still make mistakes, and its still kind of shit when you think you've nailed the spelling, re-read everything and then someone points out mistakes you didn't even know were there. Especially the people who act like you didn't even try... Oh well.
But when it comes to typing I do OK, I transpose letters here and there, but I get by and I can read just fine, it's just in my writing that one can really tell there is something off.
Then you are one up on me. My handwriting is so bad that I myself often have difficulty reading it. It has never made much difference to me professionally. Anything that really matters is typed into some sort of device.
People at meetings often comment that I take few notes. Typing during a meeting is impolite imho and my handwriting of notes would be less than useful. So I just listen and have learned to remember what was said until I can minute it later.
When I try this the text and meaning changes, but the context stays the same. For example reading an invitation: It stays an invitation but date and location change whenever I read it.
"Eye movement disorder involved," then I got to the bottom of the text, and re-read it correctly. This happens to me fairly often. Am I dyslexic?
Sometimes I think this is an artifact of occasionally looking at groups of words as a single term. If I read each word deliberately, I don't encounter this problem.
From my understanding of dyslexia, this is not it.
The website in the OP reminds me more of the experience of trying to read during a semi-lucid dream, or my experience with deliriants. The "visual fuzz" created from letters jumping around and changing before your eyes. I would look at my clock and it might be two different times superimposed on each other, or just a completely different language or set of symbols.
It's a nerve-wracking experience when caused by a deliriant, but it's also a common tool I use to help me realize I'm in a dream to break into lucidness. The clock will almost never read the same way twice in a dream! Often neither will a sign or piece of paper.
A similar thing happens to me if there's to many of the same number/letter together (for example, in 000043452 I have a lot of trouble counting the number of zeroes).
I always thought it was normal, but it feels very similar to this website. Do I have a mild form of dyslexia? or is it normal?
I've always assumed this was laziness on my part, and so I've recently tried to re-learn music reading, and it is getting easier (recently found PianoBooster software which has been quite useful), but still finding it difficult to read even a single note.
There was a recommendation when I went to Uni to get tested for dyslexia, even if you have no symptoms, because more people have it than you would think. And given that there is a range of types and symptoms, the possibility that this is a form of dyslexia is reasonably high.
That said, the fact that anyone can read anything is fairly remarkable when you think about it. I don't know whether we have any evolutionary basis for the repeated recognition of small characters, but I doubt it, and if so the fact that a large proportion of our brains are malleable enough to be trained for it is something impressive.
I'm just gonna have to keep practising and hope something clicks. Good luck!
I don’t understand how it would be possible to ever replicate it though, unless someone could be cured and then judge it’s realism. I understood this site to be replicating the reading experience, rather than a literal reflection of what you see.
For example: Doing reading comprehension tests in school, I would often perform well, if not a bit slowly. Given a book report, however, I would not be able to keep up such effort for very long; reading that way was very strenuous. Furthermore, when tasked with reading out loud, I slow to a crawl, begin to stutter, and translate inaccurately.
Anyways, my point is that, we can sometimes read normally, it can just be extra difficult.
As for this example specifically, I can't speak to its authenticity since I don't have the "moving characters" symptoms. My issues mostly revolve around poor eye tracking.
I wonder if dyslexia is as “simple” as a saccadic deficiency at root...
Edit: well, whaddya know. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9842764/
I also think dyslexia is a much wider category with many different root cause than most people talk about. Kinda like how autism exists on a spectrum the same thing is true for dyslexia.
What's the frequency with which a dyslexic person experiences this?
....... from my other comment:
See, for example... when I first read this comment, I read: "Eye movement disorder involved," then I got to the bottom of the text, and re-read it (eye movement sensor) correctly. This happens to me fairly often. Am I dyslexic?
...
This is getting really common for me. I'll read a sentence in a way that makes perfect sense, then go back, re-read it, and discover I misread one of the words. It's frustrating because I don't have any indication something is amiss. Is this abnormal?
I'll see a bunch of things, all the same colour. Then I'll realise it's supposed to be colour coded and they'll start swapping colours until they settle down. Sometimes correctly, sometimes not.
I had this a lot in school with red and green on the whiteboard.
Since I've realized this, it is intriguing to me in the same kind of way, that what we see and what there "is" __in a face__ is quite different!
I've found I mostly just momentarily see things that are not there, like at all. It doesn't even surprise me much anymore, not that being used to sleep deprivation is a good thing :)
I can see the letters, I could read the words, but they held little meaning to me.
Almost as if 90% were in another language, yet I could grasp the basic gist, but nothing more.
Oddly I have almost no trouble reading this page.