Now for the specifics: I recall being very slow in my reading development until (I think) the age of seven. I plodded on, in unstimulating and repetitive lessons all-too-clearly designed for the dull and the 'difficult', picking up an elementary facility with written English characterised by haphazard spelling and a frequent tendency to write from right to left.

Then I was given an series of books which, while simple in their choice of words, were rich and engaging, and compelling reading for an intelligent seven-year-old. I devoured them and became a speed-reader. I have no idea how (or rather, I have off-the wall ideas that could not be tested well enough to form published research) and now, despite my rather hit-and-miss abilities as a typist, I rarely if ever make a spelling error. So I'm not dyslexic.

Really. Not at all.

Except that the third-year project showed up such a compelling spectrum of dyslexia-related deficits and abilities that no sensible clinician, presented with analogous diagnostic data for some condition (for argument's sake named after one common symptom which is usually present and accompanied by a strongly-correlated set of secondary symptoms) would have any hesitation in applying the correct label to the 'patient'.

That being said, I am very wary of the label 'dyslexic': forty years ago it meant 'too stupid to read' and for the last twenty years or so it meant, in London Schools 'pushy middle-class parents have a truculent and stupid child who is going to get extra resources and the dyslexia tuition budget is the way we do this'.

Names and faces are the crippling deficit of my not-dyslexia. Distance judgement, and my odd 3D perception are an inconvenience. But visual abilities - and reading with the visual cortex, instead of childishly mumbling and subvocalising through the text with the auditory cortex, like 'normal' children - are where I live and work and practice my artistic abilities.

Now picture the second practical in the Department of Human Anatomy, before we do any actual dissection: piles or slotted rows of perspex discs are presented for our perplexed inspection. These disks have shapes or patterns on them, and apparently there is something terribly challenging about all this, requiring lengthy explanations in increasingly-exasperated tones and a lot of pointing. The discs are cross-sections, in sequence, and the lesson is that we can learn to put them together and redraw the original object in 3-D; particularly clever students can even draw out a series of vertical cross-sections if they stare very hard at the longitudinal sequence of perspex slices.

It took me half-an-hour of baffled incomprehension to realise that was the whole idea of the lesson. "Look", I said to the lecturer (the DHA wasn't at that time headed by a professor), who was equally baffled by the notion that someone just looked and knew it: "Is this supposed to be difficult?"

"Give me a hard-boiled egg, and slice it, and I will recreate it just like the models on the rack. Take a hard-boiled egg, or any specimen in this room, and put it on a fork, rotate it while you pass it through a cheesewire at any angle, and spread the slices flat; I will draw it in sequential sections, isometric projection or a cutaway perspective diagram, faster than the C-T scanning programme on the Vax".

I think the thing that convinced him was the reference to tomography, which was at that time space-age science, available to a select few clinicians in hospitals with unimaginable equipment budgets. We had a brief and entertaining chat about CT scanners and the (then) black art of identifying locally-concentrated X-Ray doses when you specify particular types of sequential section.

I think he was terribly disappointed when my academic career ran into the sands of depressive illness and a dyslexic's inability to manage the grinding labour of rote-learned naming and listings that were - and still are - the only way that human anatomy is taught and subsequently examined in preclinical medical schools.

Now does all this rambling help you understand what I mean - and what I think is meant in a broad sense - by the word 'Dyslexia'?