When a person without dyslexia reads a paragraph, I’m told that they focus on one word at a time. I focus on that word and the next three. I also don’t just read that word, I read the words around it too. In the same window I’ve taken in the scene and small deviations so many times I’ve spotted the anomalies they struggle to see even once I’ve pointed them out.
Here’s an example. My uncle recently bought a home and had been living there for months before I visited. As he opened the door a new visual process started. There was something out of place that I spotted but needed to take a second confirmational look for. The vertical rods on the second-floor banister leaned in slightly.
“Do you know the rails on your second floor are leaning to the right?” I asked my uncle as I pulled away from our hello hug. He turned around and said “no, those are straight,” but left to get a level then confirmed for himself what I already knew before I had to go back for a confirming look on my own.
This is not unique to dyslexics; we just have more practice with it because it’s an inherent part of our compensation skill. The brain processes images in stages. For me when I look at something I process abnormalities almost instantly. This is the result of a lifetime of training myself to assume to see what neurotypical people see and have corrected or made fun of me for not seeing. Through immediately seeing what’s wrong I can do one of two things:
- Point it out as funny to distract people and buy time to see what they do,
- Disregard and continue the process until only the correct or commonly accepted as correct things remain.
The mental handicap of dyslexia should not be isolated to a diagnosis. A one size fits all approach will not work because cultural, socioeconomic, and environmental influences also factor in. Dyslexia could be one of many mental handicaps a person has, or misdiagnosis based on a psychologist’s bias. Add up this laundry list of potential outcomes and you start to understand that understanding the mental handicap is part art, part science, part belief, and part acceptance.
Side Note: I prefer using the term mental handicap over the more popular terms of neurodiverse, neurodivergent, or intellectual disability, etc. A handicap denotes being slowed down, needing assistance with accessibility, or something like that. If mental handicap is not for you, trust me I understand. I feel that way about the list I just presented.
A neurological handicap introduces latency or errors, so there has to be a compensating function. Thanks to neuroplasticity, exposure, repetition and my own personality, this compensating function is the capability to fail fast without beating myself up. When overcoming error while learning, that capability becomes an unintentional positive consequence.
Carol Dweck’s work on this is summarized masterfully when she states that failure, “doesn’t define you. It’s a problem to be faced, dealt with, and learned from.” However, to do this you have to fall into the “growth mindset” category. There must have been something initiated internally that accepts critiques without reframing them as criticisms, which is exponentially easier said than done.
Doing requires three stages. First acknowledgement, then intention, and finally action. The mortar that holds those stages together is follow-through. If you acknowledge that something is incorrect and do not commit to changing, there is no way you will do what needs to be done. With reading or seeing words there is a step in the phases of visual processing that throws an error.
Mentally you have processed something but audibly you didn’t.
What happens next? A dyslexic will back-read while trying to error check at the same time. Hearing what you are reading can be confusing without the additional difficulties of missing whole words or second guessing what you see vs. what you thought you saw. Yes, it’s frustrating but exposure to a common set of words related to an area of study helps. Over time dyslexics hone a skill of seeing whole sentences or paragraphs. We learn how to regulate adrenaline and breath rates to control anxiety. The outcome is that reading has evolved into a full-body experience, not just a mental one.
The urban legend that you burn more calories through mental work is just that, mythology, but mental fatigue isn’t. Whenever you exert a lot of effort with anything muscular or mental, you will get tired. As a result of this, there are those who would much rather avoid the stress. For them, there are areas that provide positive social, emotional, and intellectual rewards. People like this are “fixed mindset” people, which includes all types, not just those with dyslexia.
I, however, fall into the growth mindset camp, a skill that has proven to be extremely beneficial to the more difficult reading. In the absence of comprehension, I just keep reading. Eventually I will get to a point where all of the things I didn’t understand will make sense. It’s a matter of ingest and time. My fourth-grade teacher would say “honey, just keep reading until it clicks.”
Understanding airplane schematics was the lifetime click for me. It was visual, complex, and a maze. In reading that I was encouraged to touch the paper. “Trace it out!” My instructor would say. He didn’t know I am dyslexic, and I forgot that detail during that stage of my life. Looking back today, I know it was that training that brought it all together. When I started getting deeper into computers, networks, and cyber security I had to read more. Touching the pages connected me and paced my reading.
Technical books became my safe reading. That’s where I do the majority of my context associations. High fiction is the nightmare reading. There are uncommon words, invented names, and places. Magic, and other words not rooted in logic. I drop from 475 words per minute to 200. Even at 200 wpm I still have to go over a page twice for full comprehension.
The same courage it takes to see failure as part of future success is what’s needed here: the subject being read will dramatically impact confidence, speed, and desire. Visually the words are an unfamiliar length. The peaks and valleys of sentences aren’t structured like I’m accustomed to seeing. The font is also different. Calligraphy works its way in. Conversational structures change a page from blocks of words to tree-like with the amount of whitespace and indentations.
Context switching must happen. A whole new personal expectation needs to develop as well. I know when I go from reading or writing about the research I’ve done on malware, a tech vendor, or AI, I lose speed. To appreciate this in a positive light I reframe everything. My self-talk is about how I will enjoy the process, not how I will simplify the context. Visually I play with paragraphs and the rhythm of word length. I look forward to punctuation that replaces symbols.
This is my dyslexia. It may not be yours or the one your loved one lives with, but we all live with it. The burden and the skill were never two different things. One is just the other, worked on long enough. “Honey, just keep reading until it clicks.” I still do.
References
- Seeing happens in layers. Your brain doesn’t take in a whole scene at once, it breaks it into edges, color, and motion first, then pieces those back together into what you actually recognize. Scholarpedia: What and Where Pathways
- Your brain can flag something’s “off” before you’ve consciously looked for it. That instant, involuntary sense that a line is crooked comes from an early visual layer that automatically searches for anything that doesn’t match its surroundings. Zhaoping, “A Theory of Bottom-Up Saliency in V1”
- Practice physically rewires your brain, at any age. The brain strengthens circuits you actually use and lets the ones you don’t fade, which is the real mechanism behind “getting better at something through repetition.” Kleim & Jones, “Principles of Experience-Dependent Neural Plasticity”
- Growth mindset means treating a mistake as an event, not an identity. People who see failure as something that happened to them, instead of proof of who they are, recover faster and learn more from it. fs.blog, “Carol Dweck: A Summary of Growth and Fixed Mindsets”
- The dyslexic “stutter” isn’t a vision problem, it’s a handoff problem. The eyes see the letter fine, the breakdown happens in the split-second link between seeing a letter and matching it to its sound. Frontiers, “Reading-Induced Shifts in Speech Perception in Dyslexic and Typically Reading Children”
- “Thinking hard burns extra calories” is a myth, but mental fatigue is real. Your brain barely uses more energy during hard thinking than it does at rest, the tiredness you feel is real, it’s just not a calorie-burn problem. Scientific American, “Does Thinking Really Hard Burn More Calories?”
- Reading out loud is genuinely stressful for the body, not just the mind. Kids with dyslexia show measurable stress-response spikes tied specifically to reading aloud, not just to reading in general. Wiley, Buchweitz et al., “Developmental Dyslexia and the Stress of Reading”
- Some adults with childhood dyslexia read well now by leaning on context, not by “curing” the underlying issue. They compensate by using surrounding words and familiar subject matter to fill in gaps that decoding alone can’t cover, which is exactly why familiar material reads easier. PMC, “Text Reading Fluency and Text Reading Comprehension in University Students With and Without Dyslexia”
- “Trace it with your finger” is a real, decades-old teaching method for dyslexia, not just a helpful coincidence. Adding touch and movement to reading, on top of just seeing and hearing it, is the whole idea behind one of the oldest structured literacy approaches out there. Orton-Gillingham Approach Overview
- Fiction really is harder for a lot of dyslexic readers, and it’s not just you. Made-up names, invented words, and unfamiliar sentence rhythm remove the context clues that usually help dyslexic readers get by. Springer, “Reading Experiences and Reading Efficiency Among Adults with Dyslexia”
- “Special dyslexia fonts” mostly don’t work, spacing does. Fonts marketed specifically for dyslexia haven’t been shown to actually improve reading speed or comprehension, but wider letter spacing consistently helps. Pimp My Type, “Dyslexia Friendly Fonts: Are They Any Good?”
- Dyslexia doesn’t go away in adulthood, it just gets managed better. The underlying wiring difference is still measurable in adult brains, even in people who read well, it’s compensated for, not cured. ScienceDirect, “Phonological Deficits in Dyslexia Impede Lexical Processing of Spoken Words”
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