Dyslexia In VGs and AHs


This is from Anthony (VG):

“I am a Visual-Spatial Learner (VSL), good in math, and have a bit of Dyslexia. I also love jigsaw puzzles and brain teaser type games.

I have the ability to see something from all angles in my mind, which is a quality of Dyslexics. Part of the reason that they sometimes confuse letters and write backwards and upside down is that we see them as 3-dimensional and are viewing them from another angle such as the back, top or bottom.

You don’t get much more visual than that! We cannot get meaning from just a symbol. Letters and words need to be understood and be able to make a picture in our minds to make sense and meaning to us...

When you say the word dog out loud, we see a dog in our minds. When we see d-o-g, we see weird shapes (from all angles) but we don’t see a dog....

The good thing is that we’re great at seeing other things from all angles, like models, architectural drawings, etc.. It’s easy for us to see a 3-D drawing in our minds as long as the picture represents something.”


This is from John Ratey (AH):

“ADDers (for this discussion I will group the ADDer with the specific Dyslexic) misperceives reality in many ways, because their brains are speeding along - going faster than they need be - always searching for the next letter or word.

Before accurately grasping the “b”, they sometimes turn it in their head and see or write a “d”. They see a word briefly and then they speed their gaze onward to the next word.

The ADDer, always pushed and driven faster than necessary, sees the bit of reality (whether it be the word, the event, the emotion), but they are propelled by their inner “What’s Nextness”. Thus they catch a half or part-representation of the fact before them and miss the full appreciation of the reality bit.

Any attempt at delaying the demands of the “What’s Nextness” is met with frustration and often frank anger; there is a push ever forward, ever faster, to get out of this fix of not quite perceiving and being uncertain...”


This, I feel, partially describes an essential difference between VG and AH. The way I experience my visual sense isn’t anything like what Anthony describes here, and seems much more like what Ratey says; my assessment is not precise since many VGs can experience the “What’s Nextness”, but not quite the way Ratey describes it.

If someone spells a word by speaking it out loud letter by letter, it doesn’t make any sense to me. I first have to put all the letters together and form a visual picture of the written word, and then I understand it. Thus if someone speaks out the letters D-A-L-M-A-T-I-A-N, I won’t know what that is until I visually form the written word “dalmatian”. (This would explain why I have a problem with the notion of me being an ASL - “Audio Sequential Learner” - since I have some difficulty with audio processing, yet I am the absolute opposite of a VSL.)

In contrast, the VG will see the written word much quicker in their mind than I would, but would probably then see the word in 3D white letters with black spots!


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