Tuesday 9 June 2009

When the Brain Cannot Learn To Read (1)

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When the Brain Cannot Learn To Read (1)

Knowledge about reading failure provides a different angle on this knowledge base, with some surprises for anyone who looks there.

Why so many children with dyslexia, have difficulty not only with reading but also with seemingly simple linguistic behaviours like discriminating individual sound or phonemes within words, or quickly retrieving the name of a colour. By tracking activity in the brain as it performs these various behaviours in normal development and in dyslexia, we are constructing living maps of the neural landscape.

The surprises on this landscape increase daily. Recent advances in neuroimaging research begin to paint a different picture of the brain of a person with dyslexia that may have enormous implication for future research, and particularly for intervention. Understanding these advances can make the difference between having a huge number of our future citizens poised to contribute to society and having a huge number who cannot contribute what they could otherwise.

Connecting what we know about the typical child`s development to what we know about impediment in reading can help us reclaim the lost potential of millions of children, many of whom have strengths that could light up our lives.

For we are also in the exciting early stages of understanding the title-studied that accompany the brain development of some persons with dyslexia. It is no longer reducible to coincidence that so many inventors, artists, architects, computer designers, radiologist, and financiers have a childhood history of dyslexia. The inventors Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell, the artists Leonardo da Vinci and Auguste Rodin are all extraordinarily successful individuals with a history of dyslexia or related reading disorders.


"Proust and the Squid", The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, Maryanne Wolf, 2007, pages 9 - 10

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