Why ‘resilient dyslexics’ have good reading comprehension | Hacker News Reader

Why ‘resilient dyslexics’ have good reading comprehension

israel21c.org

36 pointslaurex15 comments

I'm not sure what I've got. I can read very well, I can express myself through speech and the typed word well also.

What I can't do, is write with my hands. I've never been able to (I'm in my 40's now). It's like I don't have fine motor control over my fingers to form letters, even though I can build and make tiny things with my hands and fingers. I have to grip the pen or pencil with a vice-like grip just to be able to move it in small movements.

Additionally, letters get written in the wrong order or back to front. The frequency of this happening is every other word or so. Even short words like 'and' or 'to' can get screwed up.

To combat the problem I switched to all-caps in my handwriting during secondary (high) school. To this day I avoid writing anything by hand if I can help it. I've never been able to actually pin down whats wrong with me, so the best I settle on, 'is some kind of dyslexia'.

I'm also left handed, but I'm not sure that's a factor.

EDIT: Thanks guys! It's definitely 'dyslexic dysgraphia' as per the Wikipedia article. Like RobertRoberts said in a comment below, this is why I frequent HN more than any other forum. You won't believe how much better I suddenly feel about this.

It’s called dysgraphia, brother. Join the club!

In my experience the only difference with left-handed writing is that our letters aren't as clean because we are typically taught by right-handed teachers in a right-handed classroom so we have to figure out how to draw the letter-forms ourselves, and I don't recall any of my teachers actually telling us this or showing us how to do it left-handed.

I'm in a similar situation. I now suspect my issue is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dysgraphia

I'm not sure that was very well known when I was in school (we're about the same age) but it matches my issues pretty closely including the ADHD

I can write correctly, but never neatly, no matter how hard I try. I have been an artist my entire life, and professional artist for a while.

But also, I transpose numbers in memory. I can read a number, a price, and phone number. And minutes later, I have to try really hard to recall the numbers in the correct order. A day later and I am totally convinced of my memory, but the numbers are not in the right order. Most often it's a pair.

In college I learned to memorize an entire deck of cards (not in order though), and I could have a friend take out a few cards. I could then look at the remaining cards in the deck, only once each, and tell my friend which cards he had taken out. (this is all technique and training, no memory wizard here)

But still can't keep numbers straight.

Edit: At the bottom of the dysgraphia page some commenters linked to, there's other related issues. The one I found was dyscalculia [0], I had NO idea this was a thing!! Ha. This explains my entire childhood. Thanks HN for seemingly random information changing my life.

I can measure something like 10 times, and still cut the wrong length of board. I have to work really, really hard to cut and measure things correctly. I couldn't remember how the friggin denominator worked, still. I have kids and I had a hard time teaching them fractions. Yet I have thousands of lines of code clearly in my head right now...

My wife can tell me the price of an item with the sales percent automatically, and tally up a bill with the tip in an instant, (and she hates math and was never good at it!) and I would have to get out pencil/paper or concentrate incredibly hard, and still likely be off.

What a revelation. Thanks guys for this discussion.

Edit: I don't think I have dysgraphia, (nothing severe like some of the comments here) but I also write in all caps because of "general" writing problems, I wonder if there's a mix of issues that are related.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyscalculia

This is me too. I don't struggle with logic or patterns so can get by very well even in maths related matters, but have to constantly recheck the numbers themselves. I swear they move around of their own accord.

I totally understand. I would do a problem, like an equation, and I would swear by the end the original numbers had changed on me.

I work in assistive technology and was recently talking with the head of accessibility at Intuit.

He is looking for (paid) volunteers who have dyscalculia to help them with product design decisions. If you email me (my username at gmail) I can put you in touch.

I emailed you, let me know if you don't get it. (copy/paste error?) Thanks for the consideration.

Ah Similar to I learnt to read at 4 or 5 but look me 3 extra years to pass the basic English language O level (normal taken at 16 or 15 )

I had pretty severe dysgraphia throughout childhood and teens. Completely unintelligible. Couldn't draw simple shapes. For whatever reason I kept taking notes and doing drawing exercises. Got to a point where I can finally read my own notes months down the road. I can draw a circle that's actually a circle. It's still terrible but it's nothing like it was before.

Switching hands helped a bit too.

these results aren't very surprising but i guess it's good that they did a study.

the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is essential for executive functions like working memory, as the article notes. this means that if you have a strong DLPFC, you can more easily orient your attention towards a goal, check your progress, maintain your effort, and monitor yourself in the meantime.

so basically if you are monitoring your own cognition efficiently while doing the task, you can catch dyslexic mistakes and correct them in your comprehension. that's my hypothesis at least. it's very tough to really say these things with confidence because the DLPFC is implicated in an entire smattering of learning disabilities and executive functions and so generalized lower activity/density may have an innumerable quantity of consequences.

Thoughts: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29412010 / http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal....

I wasn't sure how to interpret the study. That is, they describe "resilient dyslexics" as individuals who have good comprehension in spite of decoding issues. How do these individuals compare to non-dyslexic readers? Do they have the same comprehension — but it just takes them longer to get there? Or does their comprehension still lag non-dyslexic peers?

If they have comparable comprehension but in a longer timeframe, then does this mean that non-resilient dyslexic readers cannot (in any amount of time) achieve the typical level of comprehension? This seems at odds with my understanding of dyslexia, and I work in the field.

I was just thinking today - I read easily, but alphabetizing is relatively difficult. I'm trying to alphabetize some things, and I'm repeating the first few letters in my mind. Words and spellings are correlated in my head, but when I read I'm not automatically working with the letters; it takes work to produce them. I also sometimes have a momentary inability to compare letters, so I have to recall part of the alphabet in sequence to locate myself. Like, say, I suddenly can't remember whether "I" or "M" comes first until I run through "IJKLM".

I don't think I am or have been dyslexic, but I have no point of comparison.

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