It's not very different from trying to comprehend a foreign language, which is torture to dyslexics.
Dyslexics also have a number of subtle vision problems that could interfere with reading.
The deaf, like dyslexics, rarely win spelling bees, as they tend to produce wildly inaccurate spellings.
Anatomical differences between the brains of dyslexics and non-dyslexics were first noticed in 1979.
First, the brain anatomy of dyslexics differs in subtle ways from that of non-dyslexics.
They also scanned the brains of some control dyslexics who were not on the programme.
Dr Gabrieli and his team studied ten dyslexic adults and ten non-dyslexics (who acted as controls).
It seems that dyslexics may have particular difficulty in processing rhythmic patterns in speech.
In listening and speaking, Dr Tallal and Dr Merzenich argue, dyslexics learn to compensate for their hearing problem.
As a result, dyslexics make lots of mistakes when mentally converting sounds to letters and letters to sounds.
Without such help, dyslexics may become accurate readers, but they never read fluidly.
Dyslexics have much less activity there and more in the two slower areas.
The two researchers are convinced that the brains of dyslexics store an improper and unreliable representation of phoneme sounds.
Albert Galaburda of Harvard Medical School found two sorts of microscopic flaws in the language centres of dyslexics' brains.
Comparing dyslexics in various countries, they found that English-speaking dyslexics experienced far more problems with reading and writing than the others.
When people performed this task inside the scanner, a significantly smaller part of the brain in Brodmann's Area 37 lit up in dyslexics than non-dyslexics.
Dr Eden and Dr Zeffiro have also compared the brain activity of dyslexics and readers who were given a task that has nothing to do with reading.
Electrophysiological studies have shown that the magnocellular path does not operate properly in dyslexics: it is one-twentieth of a second slower in its response than in normal subjects.
Dyslexics, after all, seem to have no difficulty communicating orally.
Not only did the people in the control group have better myelination in this part of the brain than the dyslexics, but differences were also seen within each group.
That is probably connected with the fact that the magno cells in dyslexics are almost 30% smaller than they should be, and nicely parallels the results obtained by Dr Lo Turco.
His favorite project these days is advocating for dyslexics.
Dyslexia was long thought to be a vision-related problem, but there's a growing consensus that dyslexics instead have difficulty associating letters with spoken sounds and blending them together fluidly to make words.
Two possible explanations are that dyslexics learn early in life to delegate certain tasks to trustworthy people, and that they do well in business to make up for doing badly at school.
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