they all seem to have in common the idea that it's a disability or difficulty
That is a remarkable insight, and it has ramifications far beyond reading scores and the ability to catch a ball.
My definition of 'Dyslexia' does not appear to tally with the strict 'learning difficulty' definition that is presented by that Wikipedia article in confident tones and strictly-defined terms of one's ability to acquire reading skills at school.
Nor do I recognise much of what I know - or thought I knew - in the 'magnocellular theory' section, which is Wikipedia's only concession to the view that dyslexia is a broader condition which presents a notable symptom - poor reading scores - among other less-obvious differences from the statistical norms of the general population.
So what follows is a purely personal view, a series of anecdotes and a precis of the discussions following a fellow-student's third-year clinical psychology project, twenty years ago.
At that time, clinicians had noted that dyslexic children presented other symptoms: the inability to catch a ball, balance problems or dyspraxia, poor performance judging distances, 'cross-lateral' phenomena, difficulty with names and - frequently - other cognitive or memory-based problems that have a common theme of somehow failing to link things with other things.
When studied more closely, children and dyslexic adults that had been educated in a sufficiently rich environment (not always true of children regarded as 'dull' because of their reading problems) were found to have abilities that challenged the notion of dyslexia being a 'disorder' or 'learning difficulty': visual recall, spatial skills, an innate ability with 3-D visualisation, logical and analytical abilities that are nowadays highly-prized among database developers. Some of it (like my hoover-like appetite for lexicological trivia) grow out of adaptations to the 'words' deficit; others are innate gifts and valuable skills.
As in all psychological diagnoses, the researchers (and clinicians familiar with the work and unencumbered by ideology or mechanistic diagnostic methodologies) saw that there was no 'definitive' case: one person could have one, or some - but rarely all - of the signs and symptoms. Some, like poor distance-judgement, would seem to contradict others - like the exceptional spatial skills observed in a majority of 'dyslexic' teenagers.
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'?
I never did get to write any tomographic algorithms, so the mathematical core of your work is beyond me.
More to the point, your work appears to be very different from macro-scale tomography, which is all about interpreting multiple views though an object as spatial data for image processing; I think you're doing something closer to X-Ray Crystallography, which is the analysis of patterns thrown off regular structures like crystal planes.
Not very clearly, I'm afraid; unless I missed something big in your two comments here, you went straight from "reasons to think there was an overarching theme at work" to "specific examples", without any real definition of the category you're describing.
But I certainly don't see myself in there; the only thing I can remotely recognise in my own childhood was an inability to catch a ball (for which I eventually overcompensated by teaching myself to juggle around age twelve). I was reading fluently from age two or three, and by the time I went to school the teachers simply had to find other things for me to do while they did reading with everyone else. In every other respect you mention, I don't see myself as unusual (in either the inconvenient ways or the potentially useful ones!).
The overarching theme is that cognitive psychology, like clinical pyschiatry, rarely presents neatly-defined single-symptom disorders and conditions.
Instead of the convenient categories and labels so beloved of the press and the education authorities, you get broadly-defined syndromes named after one symptom that are actually complex sets of symptoms, some of which will be present to a lesser or greater degree; and some of which will be absent - including the 'headline' symptom.
This is the point with dyslexia: if clinical practice is to be based on rational diagnostic methodology then we have to accept that children and adults who read well (sometimes exceptionally so) but still present an overlapping set of visual, cognitive and spatial deficits that is heavily correlated with 'dyslexic dyslexics' are people with the same condition.
Or a very, very closely related cognitive abnormality that causes dyslexia in others. And your description of left-eye/right eye differences in image-processing - and outright cognitive dissonance between the two inputs - really rings a bell with anyone who's read about remedial reading tutors trying out coloured spectacles and blanking lenses in the belief that it's a visual disorder.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
they all seem to have in common the idea that it's a disability or difficulty
That is a remarkable insight, and it has ramifications far beyond reading scores and the ability to catch a ball.
My definition of 'Dyslexia' does not appear to tally with the strict 'learning difficulty' definition that is presented by that Wikipedia article in confident tones and strictly-defined terms of one's ability to acquire reading skills at school.
Nor do I recognise much of what I know - or thought I knew - in the 'magnocellular theory' section, which is Wikipedia's only concession to the view that dyslexia is a broader condition which presents a notable symptom - poor reading scores - among other less-obvious differences from the statistical norms of the general population.
So what follows is a purely personal view, a series of anecdotes and a precis of the discussions following a fellow-student's third-year clinical psychology project, twenty years ago.
At that time, clinicians had noted that dyslexic children presented other symptoms: the inability to catch a ball, balance problems or dyspraxia, poor performance judging distances, 'cross-lateral' phenomena, difficulty with names and - frequently - other cognitive or memory-based problems that have a common theme of somehow failing to link things with other things.
When studied more closely, children and dyslexic adults that had been educated in a sufficiently rich environment (not always true of children regarded as 'dull' because of their reading problems) were found to have abilities that challenged the notion of dyslexia being a 'disorder' or 'learning difficulty': visual recall, spatial skills, an innate ability with 3-D visualisation, logical and analytical abilities that are nowadays highly-prized among database developers. Some of it (like my hoover-like appetite for lexicological trivia) grow out of adaptations to the 'words' deficit; others are innate gifts and valuable skills.
As in all psychological diagnoses, the researchers (and clinicians familiar with the work and unencumbered by ideology or mechanistic diagnostic methodologies) saw that there was no 'definitive' case: one person could have one, or some - but rarely all - of the signs and symptoms. Some, like poor distance-judgement, would seem to contradict others - like the exceptional spatial skills observed in a majority of 'dyslexic' teenagers.
Continues...
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'?
I never did get to write any tomographic algorithms, so the mathematical core of your work is beyond me.
More to the point, your work appears to be very different from macro-scale tomography, which is all about interpreting multiple views though an object as spatial data for image processing; I think you're doing something closer to X-Ray Crystallography, which is the analysis of patterns thrown off regular structures like crystal planes.
But I certainly don't see myself in there; the only thing I can remotely recognise in my own childhood was an inability to catch a ball (for which I eventually overcompensated by teaching myself to juggle around age twelve). I was reading fluently from age two or three, and by the time I went to school the teachers simply had to find other things for me to do while they did reading with everyone else. In every other respect you mention, I don't see myself as unusual (in either the inconvenient ways or the potentially useful ones!).
Instead of the convenient categories and labels so beloved of the press and the education authorities, you get broadly-defined syndromes named after one symptom that are actually complex sets of symptoms, some of which will be present to a lesser or greater degree; and some of which will be absent - including the 'headline' symptom.
This is the point with dyslexia: if clinical practice is to be based on rational diagnostic methodology then we have to accept that children and adults who read well (sometimes exceptionally so) but still present an overlapping set of visual, cognitive and spatial deficits that is heavily correlated with 'dyslexic dyslexics' are people with the same condition.
Or a very, very closely related cognitive abnormality that causes dyslexia in others. And your description of left-eye/right eye differences in image-processing - and outright cognitive dissonance between the two inputs - really rings a bell with anyone who's read about remedial reading tutors trying out coloured spectacles and blanking lenses in the belief that it's a visual disorder.