Hi all. Hi Geep.

Just regarding a certain way of being that some people call dyslexia.

For some people it works like this, while most people can filter visual stimulea to see it in a linear form if need be... left to right and going down the page in the case of  English text, some people, mainly visual rather than verbal thinkers, have difficulty with this filtering. They see the letters running backward and forward, up and down, diagonals and zig-zags simultaneously... they must use the cognitive rather than precognitive portion of their mind to try to filter out the "non-sensical" letter permutations.

This can be tiring, and this can be much worse when one is tired. My child was being forced to learn counting in multiples using tables. We can both do it by chanting the numbers (10, 20, 30,40...) but looking at the chart, even with the multiples hi-lighted, I actually see a flickering cloud of numbers no matter how hard I focus. This is not a psychological matter, it is purely physiological I believe. my other kid though is horrendously linear.

With this condition of text perception it is necessary to do the mental equivalent of reading with one's finger running under the lines of text... text in lines too short or too long start to flip-flop. Lines that are placed irregularly also are hard to apprehend. Colored text causes confusion because one is distracted by the pattern of color blocks on the page.

I don't believe in accommodations since life makes no accommodations. I believe in adaption though, typing instead of writing because if you don't look at the screen while you type you are dealing mainly  with motion patterns, imagining a line running from the back of your head to a point on the page that you scan. I don't know any phone numbers, not even my own or my mothers, except as patterns on the key pad... my mother types on a keyboard with the letters completely worn off. I read mainly by recognizing the pattern of shapes and how the fall above and below the middle area and basically perceive the text of at least three lines at once as though they were pictograms.

This problem with text is often found in artists and strangely enough in mathematicians... also sometimes surgeons and engineers. People who can process three-dimensional reality dynamically, who are conscious of the 3D maps the mind constantly makes to navigate. Who can see the backs of things at the same time as the front. The amount of 3D information can be overwhelming and the tendency to perceive multi-dimensional patterns such as those on a page of text can be distracting.  The habit of focusing on details to sift through visual stimulea allows a fine apprehension of detail, as a teacher doing adult education over the years I often had students who were surgeons who could not write but whose first drawings were at the level of a second or third year student. I often see images here that have terrible fatal flaws in the individual features that seem to elude people who see a face holistically.

There are certain indicators associated with the phenominea, practical things like having to even as an adult sing the alphabet song to know which letters come before which, having to break words into short sing-song 2, 3, and 4 letter patterns to spell them, "seeing" the back and sides of ordinary objects like a computer terminal while looking at the front of it, placing things behind the head when visualizing them and having a map of what is behind one (I sit with my back to the wall in restaurants but end up imagining what is behind the wall). Maybe most importantly, thinking without any internal monologue or pre-verbalization.

You may have noticed how I break my text into paragraphs and how my spelling is when I don't have my spellcheck. I type and spell check notes to the teacher before handwriting them out. I also have two master's degrees from prestigious American universities.

Anyway, this is what I think BAR-CODE was referring to.

Geep,don't go changing, to try and please me, you never let me down before.

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<br></br>Just be yourself... no apologies. You are a mensch :)<br></br>