Dyslexia

This is my story about being dyslexic. I am writing it in the hope to have those around me understand my world a little better. What is it like living with dyslexia? That is not always easy to describe because I don't know what it is like living without dyslexia. Dyslexia is not just a reading and writing problem but it changes the whole way you see the world. They say it is a spatial concept problem. The real problem is I hallucinate the ordinary and not the extraordinary and I cannot tell you what is and what is not real. What do I mean by that? It sounds crazy and it is a little bit.
'Reality is Just an illusion', Plato wrote, about the allegory of the cave. How everything we experience is just an illusion and that reality stands behind the illusion. Think of it as men who are chained to a cave so they cannot turn their heads. There is a fire in the cave and objects walk by to create shadows on the wall. The men in the cave can never see the objects casting the shadows, they only thing they can see are the shadows themselves on the wall. If they are born and die chained to the cave, the shadows are the only realities they can know. The men will never experience the true reality of the objects creating the shadows. In Plato's case he was talking about Perfection.

I related to the allegory of the cave because life is like this for me, unfortunately, most people don't realize this. Everything we experience, every touch, every sight, every sound, every smell is because our brain tells us they are real. You pick up a rose to smell it. Instantly the hand, nose and eyes send a signal to the brain and the brain sends a message back that this object feels thorny, has a color and smells sweet. It is fluid process when working properly. On the other hand, if the brain sends a signal back that what you are holding is not a rose but a snake, your body will react as if it is holding a snake. You have no way to step outside of your brain to know what you are actually holding is indeed a rose. Worse yet, the fact everyone telling you (actually probably yelling) it is a rose, still does not make it so in the dyslexic's mind.

Imagine playing a computer video game online with friends. Problem is there is glitch in you computer and your program is only about 90% accurate but does not match up with everyone else's version of the game only you don't know it. Your friend now is texting you asking why you just shot at a benign rock wasting ammo and losing points. On your screen you saw a space creature posing a threat and providing great point score, not an asteroid fragment. Meanwhile space monster Frankentoid just killed you right in front of your face, except you didn't see Frankentoid. The problem is you don't see a space creature and you have no idea in which direction to shoot. In a video game, unlike life, your friend could bring by his laptop to show you what is wrong with your computer. When that computer is your brain people can tell you what you are seeing and not seeing and you can try to tell them what you are seeing but no one can show you what they are seeing (Plato's shadows). There is no way to step outside your brain to see what everyone else sees. When what your brain sees does not match up with the real world it is simply called a hallucination.

It's Tripping Man - I'm Hallucinating

Extreme hallucinations are easy to tell if you see pink dancing elephants you know they are not real. Knowing you are having a hallucination is not enough to change it. As a child I once had an inner ear infection. Your inner ear tells your brain if you are standing up, sitting down, lying down or falling down. It is the compass for you body as to what direction you are moving and your brain makes your body orientate accordingly. Anyway, with the inner ear infection my compass became confused. I got up, only, to immediately fall to the ground. Everything in my body told me I was clinging to the ceiling and if I let go I would fall to the floor. I was able to lie there and logically figure out the house had not been turned upside down while I was sleeping. The rug was really not on the ceiling and the fan was not on the floor. This realization of reality was still not enough to quiet my fears. I was able to let go of the rug without fear of falling but I could not move my arms and legs to stand up. I couldn't even move them side ways. Still, my body, out of fear, was trying to hold on to the floor as if it was holding on to the ceiling. My brain did not know which way was up and consequently would not release my grip of the floor in fear of falling off the floor and down to the ceiling. Logical? Not in the least. Humorous? Yes, long after the fact. It is very unsettling at the moment even though I am logically aware that this was not the case. My whole body reacted to what my brain Interpretated - not what I reasoned.
Here is another example. The hallucination is an ordinary object (or is it?), such as an extra chair at the dining room table. You may know the dinning room has four chairs, not five, but you do not know if someone moved a extra chair into the dining room from the office. The extra chair may or may not be there in reality. You look stupid walking around it or even worse try to sit in it- if it is not really there and no one else can see it. If the chair really is there, it becomes a more subtle illusion of how close or far away that chair is in the room. If you go and sit on the chair and it is actually farther away then you brain tells you it is, you miss the chair and look stupid. If the chair is closer then your brain tells you it is, you run into the chair and are surprised by this and look like an air head.
Try writing a paper and in your brain the spelling is prefect and all the sentences are complete but the reality is letters and words are missing and out of order.

Logically I know why this is happening. There is conflict in my brain that does not exist in most other people. The right half and the left half of my brain hold equal power and flat out fight for control. This condition is caused when the hypothalamus in the brain is too large. Most people are either right or left brain orientated and if there is a conflict the stronger side makes the final decision and dictates to the other half what to do and how to react. In my brain neither side likes listening to the other half. Speaking is on the left half of the brain, writing is on the right half, reading is on the left half, math skills left, art right, and spatial concepts such as how close or far an object is, well that takes both halves working in tandem. To have the ability of being able to functionally read, write, and speak, the left and right brain work as one in most people. On a bad day, I am able to read a sentence but am unable to write or say what I just read. I can write a sentence and not be able to read it out loud. Every once in a great while I can write and not be able to read what I am writing. Most often, the words actually that are on the page are not the words in my head. What I am reading to you is not what really exists on paper.
How the system is supposed to work is when you write a sentence the data is simultaneously sent back to the reading and speaking part of the brain. In normal processing everyone knows what is going on and is on the same page. If you can write it you can read it and speak it. Yet, because my brain fights one half does not like communicating with the other half. Therefore I can write it, but not necessarily be able to read or verbalize accurately what I just wrote. I can say it but now rereading it may be blank because the other half of the brain didn't receive the input I just wrote. This gets worse if I get tired. It is not usually whole sentences I lose but individual letters because the fight goes on every second of the day.

Teachers can see the effects of dyslexia. If your brain never sees the same thing twice it is very difficult to have consistency. Without consistency words are misspelled different way with each sentence. Normally, if you can't spell you miss spell the word the same way every time (for example, was is always misspelled as waz). If you are Dyslexic was can be ws, wi, wuz, wis or any of the other thousand combinations, it is the result of the brain seeing something different every second of the day.
Inconsistency in visual processing can make learning to read difficult because every one else learns to read by letters not symbols. In this example non dyslexic people see this as an R, whether it is italicized, underlined, bolded, written in green, whatever, you still see an R. If you're dyslexic every change in the R your brain sees as something new and you have to learn R is the same as R is R or R, it is not a new symbol with a new meaning, all the variations of R mean the same thing. Consistency is often what it takes to learn things. I had a great English teacher in college who recognized the inconsistency in my writing and suggested I go get tested for dyslexia.

Though I always had problems in school it was not diagnosed until college. Since dyslexics see words as a whole symbol and not individual letters (this is called sight reading) it is how they caught my dyslexia. To test for dyslexia they make you read a story with silly sentences. If you saw the letters you would know the sentences were silly. For example: The girl walked out of the house and ran into the scream door. I read it as the girl walked out of the house and ran into the screen door. Screen and scream look the same to a dyslexic, we sight read or concept read because whole words are merely symbols as opposed to individual letters that the word is actually comprised of. There were other tests they gave me as well. For instance, reverse the order of a series of words that don't make a conceptual sentence. Dog, pan, black, big, yellow repeated back as yellow, big, black, pan, dog. I was not able to do that.

My mother spent years trying to help me to tell time. She thought it was because she bought me one of the first digital clocks and I learned to tell time digitally and I was too lazy to learn to tell time on an analog clock. She became so frustrated with this process that at one time she got rid of all the digital clocks on the house. I still cannot read an analog clock but I became pretty good at knowing about what time it was by where the shadows were on the ground. In addition things like commercials on television always came 15, 30 and 45 after the hour. At the time no one realized I had dyslexia which is a spatial concept problem. I can't tell time on an analog clock because to tell time there are three separate spatial relations you have to see at once. The short hand, the long hand, and where the hands are in relation to the hour and minutes on the face of the clock. People ask me what I see when I see clock. I just see a clock and that has no meaning, it is like seeing a sentence in French or Japanese when you don't read the language. They are pretty lines without meaning and knowing those lines have meaning is not enough for me to interpret what that meaning is.

The problem with spatial concepts is never more apparent to me the when I am driving. I drive with God on my side. I am about 80-90% accurate but the other 10-20%, cars are closer or further away then they appear or so several passengers have told me. Also I bother other drivers when I am a passenger. It often looks like we are going to hit a car which is not really the case, and to not react to how I see things is extremely difficult for me to do. People don't understand it is not a criticism, but simply what my brain is telling my body to do and that is to brace for impact. Parking in tight spaces is difficult because I cannot tell how close I am to the other car. Often time I literally get out of the car to walk around it to figure out how much space I really have. I am sure this procedure looks a bit strange to the casual onlooker but it is what I feel I need to do. There is no warning that objects are closer then they appear or further away then they appear. It is always a surprise when I look and something is far way and then look again and it's right there.

The other half of dyslexia is that other parts of the brain are brilliant to make up for the dyslexia. I have an overall I.Q. high enough to be in Mensa but I have the writing abilities of a third grader. This has made me an exceptional verbal communicator. It had to. I spent a large part of my life having to explain why I do the things I do. I have a Masters degree in Philosophy. By the time I started attending college, I knew I had dyslexia and my professors allowed me to take my exams orally instead of having to do them in written format. I also developed a great sense of humor, probably as a defense mechanism. I can't change it so I have learned to laugh about it. This lens was created by Rebecca Gouwar.