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Einstein had dyslexia. Hemingway had it too. It can affect people their whole lives. New discoveries may lead to new approaches to learning difficulties.
You’re familiar with this feeling: you have difficulty recognizing sounds and signs.
When you read, the flow seems intermittent and dull, the sounds don’t blend together.
You read letters as individual sounds, not as words and their meanings.
You may also miss letters, syllables or whole words when reading and writing, or change or add them. Or you may misspell mistakes and find it difficult to write clearly.
Also read: Dyslexic children today, but the future of tomorrow
learning difficulties that can last a lifetime
Dyslexia is found in approximately 5%–10% of people worldwide, making it the most common learning disorder.
Its symptoms start appearing in childhood. Boys are affected two to three times more than girls.
At school, children with dyslexia may have difficulty repeating or describing the content of lessons in a language class – such as a text they have just read.
These difficulties may occur in any school subject where reading and writing are required, including mathematics, or when an exercise is presented as a text.
Above all, people with reading and spelling difficulties struggle with prejudices because dyslexia stays with them throughout their lives. First at school, then at work and in everyday life.
However, that’s not to say much about the intelligence (or creative talent) of people with dyslexia. Famous dyslexics include Albert Einstein, Ludwig van Beethoven, Charles Darwin, Ernest Hemingway, Agatha Christie and Whoopi Goldberg… and the list goes on.
Also read: Is dyslexia a gift? It has some surprising benefits
Researchers discover the cause of dyslexia
The causes of dyslexia are not yet fully understood. However, researchers based in Dresden, Germany, say they have been able to show for the first time that dyslexia is linked to changes in the function and structure of a specific part of the human brain called the visual thalamus.
The visual thalamus is a key area of the brain that connects the eyes to the cerebral cortex, which is critical for our ability to reason, emotion, thought, memory, language, and consciousness.
Visual information received by the eyes is processed in two separate parts with different functions: one part is larger than the other and mainly processes colors. The other, smaller part recognizes motion and quickly changing images.
It is very difficult to examine structures in the visual thalamus using conventional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) because the visual thalamus is located deep in the brain and is very small. The small part of it, described above, is the size of a peppercorn.
Also Read: 3 ways to spot early signs of dyslexia in your children
How researchers observed changes in the visual thalamus
Thanks to a special MRI system at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, the researchers were able to study the visual thalamus in living humans in unprecedented detail.
The researchers found that people with dyslexia show changes in the function and structure of the movement-sensitive part of the visual thalamus. These changes are particularly evident in male dyslexics.
Their study, which was published in the journal Brain, included 25 people with dyslexia and 24 control subjects.
Researchers say this has given them a better understanding of this key area of the brain.
,[It] “This paves the way for further research aimed at gaining a more comprehensive understanding of the brain mechanisms underlying dyslexia,” said Katharina von Kriegstein, Chair of Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience at TU Dresden and author of the study.
Study reveals potential for new treatments for dyslexia
These findings could lead to the discovery of new treatments and therapies, said Christa Müller-Axt, a research associate at TU Dresden who also worked on the study.
“This could open up possibilities for non-invasive neurostimulation techniques, which are a promising therapeutic method to regulate the activity of brain structures and alleviate some of the symptoms of dyslexia,” Müller-Axt told the hosts of DW’s Science Unscripted podcast.
Müller-Axt said it’s important to know where in the brain dyslexia develops — a “new target that is directly linked to reading difficulties in dyslexia. And if we target this area and control its activity, it could really help these people in the future.”
But Müller-Axt said it will take some time for new, effective and sustainable therapeutic approaches to be developed.
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