I could do this when I was younger (tried it when I was 9 or 10 after seeing someone do it on That’s Incredible! 
) though I am not dyslexic. I have tried it a few times as an adult and was not able to do it very well at all.
I bet it’s the kind of thing that if you keep doing it, you never lose the ability.
EDIT: just tried doing it again, just in case. Nope … lost that ability completely.
Nope, West Texas.
We had to memorize all kinds of crap. Memorization tests that were written (I think that was one of them), got points taken off for misspelled words and missed punctuation!
I’m possibly midly dyslexic, in the sense that it’s not unusual for me to swap or flip letters as I’m reading and writing. I’m also one of those types of people who reads “in chunks,” for lack of a better word–I absorb whole words/phrases/whatever, which to me would seem to be exactly what you’re theorizing dyslexics can’t do.
My meaning was, “I’m commenting on your theory and not you as a person.” Sorry if that didn’t come across.
I don’t recall having to memorize any of it in high school, but my Chaucer prof in college **did **make all of us memorize a four-line-ish chunk of our choosing, which we were then to recite, with proper Middle English pronunciation. Milwaukee for both HS and university.
I tried it with pens and paper, writing carefully, and while my right hand wrote very clearly, the left made marks that were barely recognizable as backwards letters. I happen to have a whiteboard handy, though, and so I tried it there. The left side wasn’t winning any penmanship awards, but you’d certainly have been able to read it.
I noticed two things:
I had a much easier time making my left side mirror my right when the motions were broad arm strokes than when they were fine finger twitches.
I found that the trick was to not look at what the left hand was doing, and just let it mirror my right. If I looked, I got tripped up. (This also helped make the whiteboard easier, because I didn’t have both hands right in front of me.) The problem seems to be that my brain knows what motions make a given letter, and so if I think, “I’m writing ‘word’”, it’s extremely difficult to write something other than ‘w-o-r-d’. I had to consciously think, “My right hand is writing, and my left hand is just mirroring.” And I found I had a much easier time writing forwards simultaneously.
If this is in fact easier for dyslexics, it might be that for them the shapes of letters (and the motions to make them) are not as closely tied to the ideas of letters, so they can think “I’m writing an ‘a’”, and not feel as strongly that their hand really ought to be making an ‘a’. That would be a WAG, of course.
Related fun: try to write the word “happiness” while saying “coffee cup” out loud. Now reverse them, and try it again. I’d be really curious to see how dyslexics fare at that compared to non-dyslexics.
Oh no, the opposite in fact! My WAG was that dyslexics don’t (or find it more difficult to) form this “near-instinctive” association between letter and sound, and one very plausible strategy for someone who can’t form that association would be to learn words, and even phrases, as whole chunks, ignoring the relation of their parts–the letters–to the phonetic structures of the words they stand for. That way, sound-letter correspondences never have a chance to get in the way.
Anyway, though, I’ll reiterate I don’t consider this to be anything more than an uneducated, idle speculation based on some stuff I read on the internet.
i went and explained how I was diagnosed in elementary school. I was writing upside down and backwards. That is how I see writing. Think of holding a book upside down and looking at it in a mirror. I am sure that the psychologist that dealt with me some 43 years ago explained in great detail to my parents, however my dad is dead and my mom is crackers with alzheimers so I have no idea of anything other than dyslexia as a dx. I also have the typical issues with d/b and g/q switching. I can hold a book normal, or i can hold it upside down. I am great at snooping paperwork on desks that are upside down to where I am sitting
I did some looking into this when someone asked about whether you could be dyslexic in Chinese (which uses single characters for whole words). What I discovered is that you can, but it’s a different kind of dyslexia. Dyslexia is maybe best thought of like the flu - it’s actually a collection of disorders that have some similarities but are actually different. So, one way to oversimplify is to say that someone could be dyslexic in regards to letters and/or words and/or syllables.
give it a try. Simultaneously = both hands in motion at the same time, and in this case in opposite directions.
telemo na si nam a|a man is an omelet
written starting in the middle at the | and at the exact same time one hand going each way.
nope, in a polling at our house, all 3 of us can sort of recite the damned thing …
I’m moderately dyslexic and have some form of auditory processing disorder and the pop-culture descriptions of dyslexia as “oh, I see letters backwards” make me crazy. That sounds way more interesting, kinda neat, and something that one could more readily learn to deal with.
My experience is more like I see the letters looking just fine and normal if I just look at them, but as soon as I try to read them, which involves processing them in a line one-by-one, my brain loses track of what order the ones I just looked at were in and which way they were facing. And nevermind that a “B” only ever faces the one way; remembering which direction something is oriented in is like trying to remember a name that just won’t stick. (Most people have something obvious, like a name or small task, that they just cannot remember, right? For me, if a “three” looks like 3 or E is kinda like that.) This made learning phonics TOUGH, since it was an obvious obstacle to recognizing common letter groupings.
Phonics was made even harder by my having similar issues when I hear people speak. If I don’t have the context of watching someone speak, or really obvious related imagery, the various sounds of speech start to suffer a similar can’t-keep-the-order-straight block. It’s much milder than my more classic dyslexia and I do seem to have an easier time with people whose speech patterns I’ve learned and words in certain contexts. (If I’m staring at a computer screen, and someone on the phone tells me “start FireFox and then go to Gmail”, I’ll probably get what they’re saying just fine. If I’m on the phone and someone starts telling me a story about their day, I’m going to mishear, misinterpret, or just not get maybe ten percent of what they say. Which doesn’t sound like much, but in a classroom when I can’t watch the professor speak, it’s awful. Likewise, audio books and podcasts aren’t all that appealing to me.)
Luckily, I demanded to be taught to read fairly young, and perhaps my parents had patience because I was being precocious. I ended up enjoying books enough that I pushed through the difficulties and ended up testing well above my grade level in reading throughout school, however, to this day writing, especially by hand, is a struggle. I was put through years of remedial handwriting courses, none of which ever improved things. (Typing, for whatever reason, is much easier, but I know I backspace and correct much more than most do.) What’s most frustrating is it’s the actual act of writing the words-- translating them into the right string of letters in the right order and creating the corresponding shapes all facing the right way --that’s a struggle; composing them is something I enjoy and don’t believe I have too much trouble with. (Though I’d be embarassed to admit how long typing this post out is taking me!) Both issues have improved substantially as I’ve gotten older, which may have something to do with brain maturation or just practice at compensating. I can jot a legible note now, (and have even been told I have nice handwriting-- if I do, it’s because I’m having to draw each letter individually and very very carefully!) and have only had to take minimal steps to compensate now that I’m finally attending college. (I’m in my late 20s. I feel old.) But it affected my early education severely, and for many, if one’s childhood schooling goes extremely off track, it’s extremely difficult to ever overcome the results.
So, to bring this around to the OP, I certainly see how a dyslexic who had some accompanying auditory issues like my own would have a hard time memorizing dialogue, and why they might use the pat “I write upside down and backwards” descriptor, even though that’s not quite it and I feel it’s harmfully misleading.
I gave it a shot (not dyslexic). Total trainwreck.
Were we supposed to be horizontally flipping the individual letterforms for the left hand or keeping the glyphs the same but just reversing their ordering within the written text? When I attempted this before, I was flipping individual letterforms as well, not just their ordering, but perhaps that’s not what everyone else is/was talking about.
[Not that I do much better the other way, mind you. A little, perhaps, but not much.]
I write the sentence moving from right to left with my left hand at the same time i write the sentence normally with my right hand, so both hands are moving in opposite directions at the same time, writing the same things at the same time starting from a central point. Yes the letter forms for the left hand are backwards as one is writing backwards =) The left hand is writing the mirror of the right.
A semi-related thing I recall from The Early Years Of The Internet, when people besides academics, uber-nerds, and Government Departments started getting on “The Information Superhighway”, as it was often known.
Anyway, it would seem that whenever someone would type an appallingly mis-spelt (or text-speak-esque) e-mail/messageboard post, they’d be called on it by other contributors and would invariably respond with “I HAV DISLEXYIA HOW DARE U MAKE FUN OF ME FOR NOTT SPELING PROPLEY!” (or something like that). The point was, it seemed that half the people on the Internet had “dyslexia”, which I always found a bit dubious because whilst I know dyslexia is far more common that people realise, it’s not as common as it seemed to be amongst internet users and I couldn’t help but feeling that all the people who couldn’t spell were making it harder for people who genuinely had dyslexia and were trying to use The Internet to cope with it in some way.
Nowadays, of course, the standard response to “Sorry, could you at least try and type that in recognisable English?” is :rolleyes: “It’s only the INTERNET, grandad. U no what I ment neway. Get ova urself.”
Or, to put it another way: instead of trying to claim some sort of socially acceptable mitigation for their crappy spelling/typing skills/laziness (“I’m sorry I can’t write in readable English, I’ve got dyslexia”- “Really? Well, carry on then. Sorry to have troubled you.”) people now just say “Fuck you for caring about it”.
It’s an interesting contrast, I think.
Weeellll… alternative spellings are not the same thing as straightforward misspellings. The sentence you quoted demonstrates a mastery, not a deficit. (Congratulations, by the way.)
This is not to say that someone typing the above is necessarily right–for example, that kind of spelling is definitely not appropriate on the SDMB.
But my point is its wrong to conflate that kind of sentence with the straightforward misspellings you were discussing at the beginning of your post.
That’s all very true, but you have to remember (as I said earlier) that the mid-90s were really the first time “home users” could get on the net affordably. Prior to that, most of the “Netizens” tended to be, well, the sort of people who did a lot of Serious Communication and took the time to spell properly and use appropriate grammar and syntax and so forth.
The point I was making was that when people who really didn’t care about that sort of thing started coming on line in quantity, their initial responses to the “Look, could you try and communicate in recognisable English please?” crowd tended to be of the “I have a disability, how dare you criticise me for it!” rather than saying (as now) “Yeah, look, I can’t spell/type properly” and/or “I don’t care about spelling properly or using proper grammar, so go fuck yourself, grandad.”
I was simply using Netspeak as a recognisable form of “Mis-Spelt Internet English”, precisely because it’s (fortunately) not commonly used here and is therefore recognisable as being the sort of thing written by someone who either can’t spell or doesn’t care- the sort of people who used to claim they had “dyslexia” and now freely admit they can’t spell (or don’t care) and so what, it’s the internet anyway, the mid-20th Century called and they want their language back, ha ha, etc.
My brother-in-law had severe dyslexia as a child, and has struggled to overcome it. I saw first-hand the issues that he had when we played the game, “Rubik’s Race”. In fact, my in-laws ended up using the game to demonstrate the magnitude of his problem to his doctor.
The game is played on two 5x5 grids that operate as a slide puzzle (25 places for tiles, with 1 empty space). The object of the game is to duplicate a 3x3 pattern in the middle of 5x5 grid. Each player sees the same pattern but must duplicate it on his or her side of the board. Thus, if the 3x3 pattern consisted of a row of red squares, a row of white squares, and a row of blue squares, one player would have red at the top and blue at the bottom, while the other player would have blue at the top and red at the bottom. Here is a link to the game, so you can see the board: http://www.sover.net/~nichael/puzzles/rubrac/index.html.
When I played the game with my BIL, I saw that he was flipping the image over and backwards. Thus, a row that was supposed to be red/white/blue from his perspective ended up being blue/white/red, and the rows that should have been at the top ended up at the bottom.
Once we were able to see patterns in the way he could see them, many of his reading difficulties and school issues were put into context.
Good game, great diagnostic tool.
Ok, here’s where my own cognitive ability may be interfering with my own understanding. This is version of my original post. I’ll try to state my objection clearly. IF your BIL were to see the red row on the top (ROT), and then try to reproduce it, wouldn’t he also have to construct his version ROT in order for it to look like the example? The example is really ROT, but looks ROB to him. If up is down and down is up, then in order to reproduce what looks like down to him (ROB), he’d have to do it right side up (ROT), so that it would LOOK like ROB to him.
Or, here’s another version. We don’t know if everyone sees, say, blue the same way. Maybe someone sees it as what most of us call red. But if we put a blue mark on the paper and ask someone to reproduce it, he’ll grab for what we know as the blue marker - regardless of how it looks to him. And I don’t know how to interpret his statement that, “blue looks like red to me.” It’s meaningless, as far as I can tell.
Heeeeellllp!
Were you watching America’s Next Top Model?
Ha! I was wondering that, too. I was watching that while reading this thread and I was all: wait, what?