Chapter 7: Dyslexia's Puzzle and the Brain's Design

I would rather clean the mold around the bathtub than read.

-A child with Dyslexia

               Throughout the text Proust and the Squid¸ Maryanne Wolf has opened up personally about her home life and why she chose to pursue this subject for the book.  She revealed her son Ben was diagnosed with Dyslexia at a young age and struggled with reading his whole life.  She gives personal insight into how children and adults are chastised throughout their lives for the inability to read.  They are teased, mocked, made fun of and even ‘made an example of’ by teachers who do not know that there is something deep within their brain that is preventing the acquisition of language.  The last part of the book, beginning with Chapter 7, looks into what happens when the brain can’t read.

               Like most people, I had a misunderstanding of what dyslexia was my whole life.  I believed that dyslexia was a mere reversal of letters within a word.  Then, in 2003 while working as a wilderness guide, I met a fellow guide, who would eventually become a groomsman in my wedding, who told me firsthand what it was like for him to be dyslexic.  He informed me that the words would float off the page and sometimes he would read left to right.  It was then that I realized that there is no clear definition of what dyslexia is.  It is not a particular problem with reading, but a term that covers a wide variety of neural issues.  As Maryanne Wolf states, through the words of Andrew Ellis, “...whatever dyslexia turns out to be, ‘it is not a reading disorder’. …the brain was never meant to read.”

               Wolf does present however, four possible sources, or principles, for dyslexia.  The first she titles: A Flaw in the Older Structures.  In the 1870s a German scholar named Adolph Kussmaul gave the term ‘word blindness’ to a patient of his who had suffered a series of strokes.  The result of which made him unable to read, nor recognize, letters, sounds or words that he had known since childhood.  Kussmaul found there were two problems with his patient’s brain.  The first was that he had suffered damage to his ‘older’ visual center, and secondly there was damage along the reading circuit. 

As history has progressed, similar findings have been found in children who cannot read.  In 1921, Lucy Fildes found that children with problems in reading were not able to form auditory images of sounds represented by letters.  But again, there is no clear definition, so there are other explanations as well.  Virginia Berninger found that some children’s reading problems stem from issues in executive processes such as attention in memory and have corresponding problems in reading and attention.

The second principle addressed for dyslexia is A Failure to Achieve Automaticity.  Throughout this blog, I have mentioned that automaticity is one of the largest deciding factors in achieving successful literacy.  In this portion of the text, Wolf mentions that a failure of automaticity, whether at the level of neurons or structural processes, does not allow enough time for comprehension.  There are many theories for what causes the problems with automaticity.  According to Zvia Breznitz, poor readers were characterized by slower processing, but had what appeared to be a ‘gap in time’, an asynchrony between their visual and auditory processes.    What is interesting though, is that Martha Bridge Denckla found is that, ‘readers with dyslexia can name colors perfectly well, but cannot do so rapidly.”  Upon reflecting on this, I believe that though a student make take a considerable amount of time decoding, it does not mean that they are unable to read with success, it just takes them a little while longer than others.

Throughout the course of the book, Wolf has made it explicit that there is no ‘reading center’ of the brain.  There are however, connections between portions of the brain that allow for reading to occur.  The third principle addressed is An Impediment in the Circuit Connections Among the Structures.  Wolf goes on to explain that the strongest most automatic connections are forged between the posterior region and frontal areas in the left hemisphere.  However, in dyslexia, the strongest connections appear between the left occipital-temporal area, mentioned above, and the right-hemisphere frontal areas.  Magnetic imaging by a group in Houston found that children with dyslexia use an altogether reading circuitry.  I believe that Maryanne Wolf misrepresented the title of this principle by stating there was impediment, when in fact it is a completely different circuitry altogether.

She instead gives this an altogether different principle called: A Different Circuit for Reading.  While reading this section, it became clear to me that the ‘deficit’ of dyslexia is not a deficit at all, just a different set of neurons and connections than that of non-impaired readers.  The left side of the brain developed to handle precision and timing to process human speech and written language.  The right side of the brain evolved to handle things such as creativity, patter deduction and contextual skills.  Children and adults with dyslexia use more of their right brain than there left, even in reading.  Therefore, the brain is compensating by using processes not typically used for reading to compensate for the problems in the connections of the reading circuit.

Wolf concludes with her final thoughts on dyslexia on what it is and isn’t.  She believes, and I agree whole heartedly, that more sub-classifications of the term dyslexia must be created so that there can be a clearer dissemination between structural and genetic data.  The genetic data is elaborated upon more in the next chapter.

Throughout this course, and this book in particular, I have looked at everything in the context of my own teaching and classroom.  I have found this chapter to be very difficult for me to view through those parameters.  Teaching in a community where 33% of the general population is identified as English Language Learners, though everyone speaks English, the children come to school with a limited school vocabulary, a flawed secondary Discourse, and little to no academic literacy.  Almost all of my children are slower than same-age peers in other communities.  If I were to look at their delays in reading as signs of dyslexia, I might be sending a majority of my students to be screened.  To break from my own secondary Discourse about my students and create a new one for this chapter proved to be frustrating.  When you spend 8-10 hours a day with a group of students, it’s hard not to see a little of them in everything you read.

Until next time…