Dyslexia Myths

During a recent trip to Virginia I stopped next to this taxi at a traffic light.  Fortunately I had my camera and I snapped this photo.

I thought this would be a funny photo to post on my blog.  However, in a way it really isn’t 100% accurate.  Dyslexia is a disorder with many myths attached.  Probably the most common myth about dyslexia is that it is “seeing letters backwards.”  

Seeing letters backwards sometimes happens as a result of dyslexia, but there are many other symptoms than this alone.  Dyslexia is best explained as a language-based disorder resulting in difficulties with reading, spelling, writing, and mathematics.  The disorder is not a matter of a visual deficiency or a speech impediment, but of an auditory processing problem that has far-reaching consequences. 

It is important to know that people who have dyslexia do not make random mistakes such as the letter reversal on the above photograph.  Rather, people will have very consistent problems with certain sets of letters and this will be apparent in reading, writing and spelling of relevant words.

Another myth about dyslexia is that it is correlated with low intelligence.  Although some studies with very low sample sizes have correlated dyslexia to emotional intelligence, no studies have ever definitively correlated dyslexia to overall intelligence.  

In fact, both Albert Einstein and Thomas Edison had dyslexia.