Triggered by the How Fast Do You Read? thread.
I took the test and read 14% slower than the average reader…now. I think that’s pretty good, considering.
I bring it up because I think it’s interesting how the mind and body learn to adapt. When I had a stroke I lost half my vision, the right-hand side, in both eyes. Now when I look at the left-hand margin on a page I can see a word the length of “bread.” Anything to the right of that just isn’t there (dark-grayish swirling fog.) When it happened that was alarming enough but what was really frustrating was that when I came to letters like “trans—” my brain would leap ahead and try to fill in what it thought came next. So I might “read” transport when it was actually translation. “Relat—” could become relativity when it was really relationship. So I had to back up and reread every sentence. The content was almost lost and I wondered if I could ever read for pleasure again. But a few months later my brain just stopped doing that. Now reading slowly but thoroughly is so much better.
So I was wondering…have any of you experienced a “function” problem that resolved itself over time? Or have you taught yourselves different ways to do things that used to be second-nature?