8 ms·
Dyslexia: scientists claim cause of condition may lie in the eyes
- tomahunt 9y agoI think this is the link to the original paper http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1865/20171380 http://rspb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/284/1865/2017...
- crispweed 9y agoobligatory sci-hub link: http://sci-hub.io/10.1098/rspb.2017.1380 http://sci-hub.io/10.1098/rspb.2017.1380
- crispweed 9y agoIt can't be as simple as this appears to make out, right? Otherwise, it seems like you could just close one eye while reading..
- brudgers 9y agoIf it were a mechanical system, perhaps. But biology suggests that visual experiences will shape the way neurons connect during the brain's development...I hate computer analogies but consider all previous visual experiences as the training corpus for the brain's neural network. The response to a particular stimulus from one eye could readily evoke a response to that triggered by two eyes. The evidence is that people can usually read with one eye closed, under variable lighting conditions, partially obscured text, and wrds mssng vwls...though sometimes #/w is considered a vowel.
- emmab 9y agoAt 10% incidence of dyslexia, wouldn't it be possible to survey whether people blind in one eye for a long period of time or from birth have a lower rate of dyslexia?
- interfixus 9y ago10%???
- emmab 9y agoQuoted from the linked article: > About 700 million people worldwide are known to have from dyslexia – about one in 10 of the global population.
- interfixus 9y agoCould the linked article please stand up and give us some reference for this ridiculous claim?
- emmab 9y ago> Dyslexia is the most common learning disability and occurs in all areas of the world.[3][11] It affects 3–7% of the population,[3][6] however, up to 20% may have some degree of symptoms.[12] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyslexia
- wyldfire 9y agoThat's a great idea, as long as there's no common bias driving both factors. Although I suspect blind-in-one-eye will be primarily due to accidents, so that hopefully isn't correlated with dyslexia.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago> I hate computer analogies ... neural network. Isn't this a biological analogy?
- snakeboy 9y agoHe's already talking about a biological phenomenon, and describing it using an analogy to machine learning neural nets, so the analogy is not biological.
- edmccard 9y ago>an analogy to machine learning neural nets, so the analogy is not biological. Except that "neural nets" are only "neural" by a (biological) analogy to neurons. So he is describing a biological phenomemon by comparison to a a type of machine learning which is itself described by the very same biological phenomenon he's trying to describe.
- brudgers 9y ago(nothing personal) This is why I hate them. They only hold up at the level of analogy.
- djsumdog 9y agoMaybe several Unis should attempt studies with diagnosed dyslexics and controls where they attempt to read text with an eye patch?
- smallnamespace 9y agoEye patches have apparently been tried over a decade ago with some success -- here's a reference from around 2000: http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/eye-patch-therapy-a-boost-for-dyslexics-26125664.html http://www.independent.ie/irish-news/eye-patch-therapy-a-boo... The difference is now we have a strong hint as to why they work. I would expect that the social stigma would severely limit uptake in school though, which is why this isn't standard today -- kids can be rather vicious when they pick up on any hint of difference or weakness.
- zwegner 9y ago> I would expect that the social stigma would severely limit uptake in school though, which is why this isn't standard today -- kids can be rather vicious when they pick up on any hint of difference or weakness. Random idea--what about a completely opaque contact lens, with an image of an iris/pupil on the outside, customized for the person's eye color? It would likely be noticeable up close, but could take away a lot of this social stigma.
- timthelion 9y agoBetter yet, would be to simply have tinted contact lenses, so that the eyes wouldn't be "identical" but they would still give 3D vision.
- sannee 9y ago> I would expect that the social stigma would severely limit uptake in school though, which is why this isn't standard today -- kids can be rather vicious when they pick up on any hint of difference or weakness. Note that eye patches are already being commonly used in that age group for treating amblyopia
- mathgenius 9y agoI am somewhat dyslexic. I especially remember having trouble with switching the "b" and "d" when I was very young. At some point (age 10 or so) I developed a lazy eye. I can't help wondering if this was my brain's way of adapting to this problem of matching patterns in the receivers of both eyes. At times I have tried using a single contact lense for my lazy eye, but it causes headaches so I gave up on that.
- red75prime 9y ago> if this was my brain's way of adapting to this problem Probably no. It's normal for a certain period of child development.
- pavement 9y agoIn people with the condition, the cells were arranged in matching patterns in both eyes, which may be to blame for confusing the brain by producing “mirror” images. I mean, geeze. I’m kind of flabberghasted reading that. Wow. Weird. Of all the things. A rare moment when symmetry in the human body turns out to be a bad thing. I guess if it was going to a problem, optics would be the rational place where that sort of issue to seems to crop up.
- shamas 9y agoThis feels like a scenario where something is so weird and surprising that it is almost certainly incorrect. Amazingly weird reasons are almost never the reason.
- twobyfour 9y agoWhy would this be a problem for reading but not for every single other freaking task where both eyes look at and identify the same object?
- to3m 9y ago3 random guesses: - most objects are larger than letters - the details of most objects are less relevant than with lettering - you can spend more time recognising each thing, whatever it is, without slowing yourself down so much that the task becomes intractable (when reading, you have to recognise, and correctly, a lot of letters per minute)
- shmerl 9y agoSo a simple experiment would be closing one eye and compare reading?
- apk-d 9y agoDepends. I presume dyslexia affects learning, not merely reading - else, people would have discovered this by accident a long time ago. So the simple experiment would be to close one eye and then learn to read.
- lpellis 9y agoOn the same note, does dyslexia appear in people with only one eye (from young age)?
- Myrmornis 9y agoCan anyone summarize the numerical results? The abstract states 30 cases and 30 controls, but what was measured, and what was the breakdown of that measurement by cases and controls? Here's the paper. Yes I'm being lazy/incompetent, I was hoping to get the gist of the numerical results within 5 minutes and failed. Like, a table would have been nice. http://sci-hub.io/10.1098/rspb.2017.1380 http://sci-hub.io/10.1098/rspb.2017.1380
- lustig 9y agoI agree, the numerical results are poorly presented. What was measured was wether their tests can find a dominant eye in the subject or not as well as the difference in Maxwell's centroids between both eyes. Eye dominance results: They had two types of test for this; the sighting test and the after-image test. For the control group they found a dominant eye in 28 of the sighting tests and 30 in the after-image tests. In the 28 cases where they found a dominant eye with both tests, the tests corresponded perfectly, i.e. if the sighting test indicated the right eye was dominant the after-imagetest also did. For the dyslexic group the sighting test found a dominant eye for 14 subjects, and the after-image test for 3. In the 3 cases where they found a dominant eye with both tests, the results corresponded perfectly. Maxwell's centroids result: For the control group they showed that in 29 cases the asymmetry between the centroids was at least above 0.3 (as far as I can tell from the figures), where 0.3 means "weak asymmetry" and 0.6 means "strong asymmetry". One case was slightly above 0.2. For the dyslexic group 27 cases had ~0.0 in the asymmetry measure. 2 above 0.3 and one slightly below 0.3. I have generalized a bit and labeled results ranging from 0.3 to 0.5 as "above 0.3".
- Myrmornis 9y agoThanks! It sounds like an interesting result, presumably there will be fairly rapid efforts in the field to replicate these findings. (I'm influenced by the fact that this was published in a decent journal.) In order to have some sense of how these findings relate to the notion of "dyslexia" as used in public life in western countries we obviously need to look at how the case cohort was selected. They say: > all encountered difficulties in reading, spelling, writing and recognizing left from right Presumably that means that every one of the 30 had problems with all 4 of those tasks. Possibly this is a narrower definition than that used by the public / educational psychologists -- I think they often diagnose dyslexia without requiring left/right confusion as a symptom?
- slg 9y agoIt is worth noting that there likely isn't going to be a single cure for dyslexia in a similar way that there won't be a single cure for cancer. Dyslexia is really a collection of disorders that are grouped together because they share common symptoms but not necessarily common causes. It sounds like this could help the stereotypical "see letters backwards" type of dyslexia. However there are numerous forms of dyslexia that have nothing to do with inverted images or difficulty identifying letters. For example, many dyslexics are able to write code or do math without the symptoms they might experience when reading/writing prose. That wouldn't be the case if the problem was based on vision.
- bryanrasmussen 9y agoright, lots of children with SLI later go on to be diagnosed with Dyslexia, I doubt language learning problems are related to the eyes.
- jdietrich 9y ago>Dyslexia is really a collection of disorders It's a practically meaningless catch-all, because the only useful definition is "bad at reading". The DSM5 politely declines to offer any diagnostic criteria. The only treatment that consistently beats placebo is reading practice; dyslexic students improve at about the same rate as non-dyslexic students after intensive reading practice. By the logic we use to diagnose dyslexia, I have countless developmental disorders, by simple merit of being bad at lots of things. It's entirely plausible that specific but as yet unknown developmental disorders have been lumped in to the classification of dyslexia, but dyslexia itself is a politically convenient label rather than an evidence-based disorder.
- timthelion 9y agoI agree. I also think that autism spectrum disorder is a meaningless catch all. But I further believe that these catch alls are harmful and should not be used. When I was in school I read a lot of papers on autism, and I found that almost all studies found that there is no general biological cause for autism, but there were always outliers. Some 20% of autism sufferers, for example, have significantly raised serotonin. I think, that rather than concluding in study after study that, "though some subjects showed signs of raised serotonin, this was not found to be a reliable indicator of autism". We really should have created a new disorder "speech delay with elevated serotonin disorder". And started studying that as a separate dissorder. Maybe we would have gotten somewhere. But instead, the US spent millions, perhaps billions of dollars trying to figure out the one and only reason why some people can't walk. "Oh no, it can't be because they don't have legs, 90% of people who can't walk DO have legs!"
- jlebrech 9y agoI become temporarily dyslexic when I have a migraine, it's just after the blurred vision stage. I have trouble pronouncing letters, the sounds they make are jumbled up when I read. It feels like dyslexia to me but I wouldn't know for sure.
- lawlessone 9y agoYou should probably see a doctor that sounds more serious.
- WillReplyfFood 9y agoShould be testable- just find out wether dyselexia effect dissappears when looking with only one eye on text.
- sulam 9y agoExcept that because of the condition, your brain gets trained differently at recognition. Maybe it’s possible to test for this at a very young age, before the alphabet has been taught, and use the eye patch as a treatment then.
- totallynotcool 9y agoWhen I have to prepare a speech or section of reading for memorization I, more often than not, write/print it using OpenDyslexic Font[1]. I've tried many fonts over the years and for what ever reason this one seems to work best for me when reading hard copies. [1] https://opendyslexic.org https://opendyslexic.org
- brainpool 9y agoI always feel uncomfortable when researchers miss the creed ”Correlation does not imply causation”. Media jump every time - but that’s their job. In this case it is a really vague study based entirely on subjective measures and the researchers don’t pause for a moment to consider causation in subjects response to visual stimuli. There are so many shortcomings to this, mostly from the press. What is reported in the news regarding the “cure” for dyslexia is base on what 1 of the 30 subjects in the study says. I am not a believer, but I encourage more research on Dyslexia. At least the experiments in this study seem easily reproducible although I don’t expect repetitions will shed much light on the cause or cure of the condition.