Reading, Dyslexia and Brain Plasticity

Brain imaging studies have found that the brains of people with dyslexia function differently to the brains of people who are good readers. For example, areas of the brain that deal with processing individual sounds are less developed in people with dyslexia.

Theories on the Cause of Dyslexia

If you research the causes of dyslexia on the internet you will find two contradictory views:

1. Dyslexia is an inherited disease:

   Traditionally, dyslexia has been seen as a brain-based condition and a lifelong challenge which is not curable. In other words, there is something wrong with the brain that can’t be fixed – so people with dyslexia need to learn ways to cope with their disability.

2. Dyslexia is a confusion about reading that results in certain key parts of the brain not being developed fully for reading – YET!

   With the advent of modern neurological studies which use brain scans to study the functioning of the brain, dyslexia is increasingly being seen as a developmental problem that can be fixed by re-training areas of the brain to process words effectively. The term used to describe this is neuroplasticity – which just means that the brain can be retrained to change the way it functions.

What Came First – The Chicken or the Egg?

Applying this question to dyslexia it becomes: What came first – reading, or the brain?

The brain came first of course – by millions of years! Reading is a very new phenomenon in the history of the human race. Just one hundred years ago the vast majority of people in the world were illiterate.

When neuro-scientists, like Dr. Guinevere Eden Ph.D., study the brain activity of people who have never been taught to read, they find it is very different to the brain activity of good readers. This shows that we were not born with the skill to read. So, the brain must change the way it functions as someone learns to read.

Dr Eden’s key messages are:

• Every child’s brain has to change the way it functions as the child learns to read.
• People with dyslexia, for one reason or another, get confused early on about the nature of reading, and so their brains do not develop in a way that makes them efficient readers.

The Reading Spectrum

Rather than seeing reading as an ability that you either have or don’t have, it is better to treat reading as a skill that we all have to differing degrees.

At High Performance Learning, we use a program which systematically trains the person’s brain to build new pathways so it can efficiently process all the visual and auditory information associated with reading. (Our program is like the program advocated by Dr. Guinevere Eden Ph.D. in the video.)

We don’t just show people with dyslexia how to become great readers, we do it for young children, and for poor and average readers as well.

Find out more about our Dyslexia Tutoring Program which uses our unique multi-media colour-coded font that teaches reading while your read.