14 ms·

I’m dyslexic, you’re right, this is an exaggeration, but it’s almost impossible to simulate the real thing. It’s not like the letters move around the page, it’s

• caymanjim 6y ago
  That certainly explains why some dyslexic people seem to be decent at reading but not at spelling. If there's no static truth to the perceived spelling, even to the author, it's got to be nearly impossible to reliably spell.
  • Milner08 6y ago
    I am dyslexic and this is very true to me. I can read perfectly fine, although I may re-read a word occasionally, or highlight the page as I read to track where I am (A tick I was taught in school to help). But when it comes to writing its a different ballgame. With a computer its not so tricky (and its easy to hide... hello backspace), but with a pen and paper I make mistakes all time. After many years of practice I am fairly used to taking my time and making sure I spell properly now, but I still make mistakes, and its still kind of shit when you think you've nailed the spelling, re-read everything and then someone points out mistakes you didn't even know were there. Especially the people who act like you didn't even try... Oh well.
    • Jaruzel 6y ago
      I am 100% the same. I can read fluently, and at a good speed, but I cannot write legibly to save myself. I have such poor fine control with a pen/pencil that I have to hold it in a death-grip and tense my hand and arm muscles to control the letter shapes and even then it feels like the pen/pencil is fighting back. My handwriting is unreadable unless I write in capitals all time. Once I do manage to get the words down on paper, most of the time the words have letters all in the wrong order. It's really frustrating - but at least in these modern times, I rarely have to write anything manually so there's that.
    • magicalhippo 6y ago
      Do you still make mistakes writing by hand if you write with your eyes closed?
    • radiantJ 6y ago
      Do you have problem with your signature? And can you make it the same every time you sign (like for bank purposes)?
    • kls 6y ago
      Same here, it is actually how I got into computers, my writing was so bad (I have dysgraphia) that they put me in a special computer lab in the 3rd grade. I am 45 so, that was not a common thing back then. My grades improved and I did well in school, but I am functionally illiterate when it comes to actually hand writing anything. I can tell what something says when I read back something I wrote, but if you where to look at it, well it might as well be hieroglyphs, it is completely illegible to anyone else. But when it comes to typing I do OK, I transpose letters here and there, but I get by and I can read just fine, it's just in my writing that one can really tell there is something off.
      • sandworm101 6y ago
        >> it is completely illegible to anyone else. Then you are one up on me. My handwriting is so bad that I myself often have difficulty reading it. It has never made much difference to me professionally. Anything that really matters is typed into some sort of device. People at meetings often comment that I take few notes. Typing during a meeting is impolite imho and my handwriting of notes would be less than useful. So I just listen and have learned to remember what was said until I can minute it later.
        • patmorgan23 6y ago
          I find the physical act of writing helps me remember things. There's been research on this that suggests that the processesing you need to do to write something down secures it in your memory better.
• soulofmischief 6y ago
  That's a cool way to put it. I'm not dyslexic, but I've had this phenomenon happen many times before. The word literally changes in front of you when you reread it. Perception is a powerful tool but far too often we conflate our superimposed visual experience with the reality it samples. The website in the OP reminds me more of the experience of trying to read during a semi-lucid dream, or my experience with deliriants. The "visual fuzz" created from letters jumping around and changing before your eyes. I would look at my clock and it might be two different times superimposed on each other, or just a completely different language or set of symbols. It's a nerve-wracking experience when caused by a deliriant, but it's also a common tool I use to help me realize I'm in a dream to break into lucidness. The clock will almost never read the same way twice in a dream! Often neither will a sign or piece of paper.
• vertbhrtn 6y ago
  I think I've experienced this a few times, even though I'm not dyslexic. This happened when I haven't slept for long time and reading something at 4 am gave me that "thoughts out of focus" feeling, when the words are right in front of me, I know I can read them, but experiencing a funny difficulty assembling the letters together. This also happened a couple times on the half-asleep state when I've almost woken up, but still seeing the dream and for a few seconds I had this strange "out of focus" state when focusing attention on words or speech is difficult.
  • sk0g 6y ago
    Lack of sleep is one hell of a hallucinogen! I've found I mostly just momentarily see things that are not there, like at all. It doesn't even surprise me much anymore, not that being used to sleep deprivation is a good thing :)
• lifeisstillgood 6y ago
  So perhaps a closer simulation might be to do some eye tracking, and as one reads to ch age the whole word ?
• Gene_Parmesan 6y ago
  I have ADHD (where dyslexia is a common co-morbidity). I'm not dyslexic, but I tend to experience dyslexia-like symptoms with numbers. Never letters, just numbers. It made math hell in school. Like you describe, it's not that the numbers are literally moving on the page. It's that they sort of... blob together in my consciousness, like there's a blind spot in my visual understanding, and my brain tends to fill in with numbers that look close enough. I tend to transpose numbers very very easily, swapping 6s and 9s, 2s and 5s, 7s and 1s. There's an additional layer of challenge where numbers are involved; with words, there are spellings that are obviously not words, or words that don't make sense in a given sentence. With numbers, there's no easy way for your brain to check whether what you read is accurate, because there's no equivalent of numbers not making sense.
  • fiblye 6y ago
    Oh man, so this is an actual problem? I've had this a lot as well, but I only have it with numbers and with multiple choice tests. For example, if I'm given a reading passage, I can accurately answer questions about it. But once those are put in A/B/C/D or 1/2/3/4 options, I will absolutely mess them up. I will know the answer is A, I will put my pencil down on the A bubble, I will fill in A, then later on I'll see that somehow I filled in C. I had this problem a lot on tests and thought that maybe I was just being dumb and not having the correct answer, since usually you only get a scantron sheet back with zero context. About 3 years ago I started doing practice tests for language learning, of which many questions were multiple choice. I'd write the full answer for extra practice, finish the test, wait a couple minutes, then go back and check my answers. The written part of the answer would match up most of the time. The letter/number preceding it was wrong 1/4 of the time. I've also had it with math exams a few times, where I mix up digits usually around decimal points. Sometimes it even happens when coding and those are really tough problems to debug.
  • v8engine 6y ago
    Check out Dyscalculia.
  • epse 6y ago
    That tends to be called dyscalculia and also occurs often with ADHD
• kzrdude 6y ago
  Tangentially: we humans are wired and trained to read faces and expressions very well. Since I've realized this, it is intriguing to me in the same kind of way, that what we see and what there "is" __in a face__ is quite different!
• madaxe_again 6y ago
  I’m not dyslexic, but after a poor reaction to general anaesthetic, I had problems with my saccades for a while, and it manifested very much like this. Nothing would hold still, and I’d see stuff in the wrong place. I wonder if dyslexia is as “simple” as a saccadic deficiency at root... Edit: well, whaddya know. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9842764/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/9842764/
  • ultimape 6y ago
    There are tools that overlay lines over text, or only show a line at a time. Apparently this can help to train your eyes to not dart around during the saccade.
  • patmorgan23 6y ago
    I don't think that's what dyslexia is. It's a flaw at a different level of perception, or else people with dyslexia (like myself) wouldn't have difficulty spelling or keeping left right straight. I can read fine, but spelling is hell. I also think dyslexia is a much wider category with many different root cause than most people talk about. Kinda like how autism exists on a spectrum the same thing is true for dyslexia.
• h4kor 6y ago
  This sound very similar to reading in dreams. When you read something in a dream multiple times it will change between readings. This is a common technique to detect dreams in order to "start" lucid dreams. When I try this the text and meaning changes, but the context stays the same. For example reading an invitation: It stays an invitation but date and location change whenever I read it.
• Agentlien 6y ago
  I have a moderate colour vision deficiency and I sometimes experience something very similar with colours. I'll see a bunch of things, all the same colour. Then I'll realise it's supposed to be colour coded and they'll start swapping colours until they settle down. Sometimes correctly, sometimes not. I had this a lot in school with red and green on the whiteboard.
• treeman79 6y ago
  Sounds like when I was suffering minor strokes. I can see the letters, I could read the words, but they held little meaning to me. Almost as if 90% were in another language, yet I could grasp the basic gist, but nothing more. Oddly I have almost no trouble reading this page.
• kace91 6y ago
  Silly question: I recently started learning to read sheet music and I've noticed I have real difficulty counting the number of lines between two notes in the pentagram. If there's just one it's pretty clear, but if they're 2-3 or more it's like my mind can't tell them apart unless I put mi finger on top to obstruct the sight gradually. A similar thing happens to me if there's to many of the same number/letter together (for example, in 000043452 I have a lot of trouble counting the number of zeroes). I always thought it was normal, but it feels very similar to this website. Do I have a mild form of dyslexia? or is it normal?
  • jimueller 6y ago
    This seems pretty normal. I suspect this is similar to reasons why it's hard to read a really wide line of text, or that some people put a sheet of paper under their current line while reading. Something about how our minds can manage smaller groups more easily. Probably related to how telephone numbers split up and why we put commas or spaces in numbers like 1,000,000.
  • undecisive 6y ago
    I recently wondered something similar. I "learned" to play music as a child, but could never follow the notes so used to memorize the tune and use the staves as a reference for the timings. Other than with music, my reading has always been above average. I've always assumed this was laziness on my part, and so I've recently tried to re-learn music reading, and it is getting easier (recently found PianoBooster software which has been quite useful), but still finding it difficult to read even a single note. There was a recommendation when I went to Uni to get tested for dyslexia, even if you have no symptoms, because more people have it than you would think. And given that there is a range of types and symptoms, the possibility that this is a form of dyslexia is reasonably high. That said, the fact that anyone can read anything is fairly remarkable when you think about it. I don't know whether we have any evolutionary basis for the repeated recognition of small characters, but I doubt it, and if so the fact that a large proportion of our brains are malleable enough to be trained for it is something impressive. I'm just gonna have to keep practising and hope something clicks. Good luck!
  • epanchin 6y ago
• chrononaut 6y ago
  I am dyslexic as well, and have the exact experiences you describe. I wonder of a better "simulation" is the random subtle replacement of words in a text with other words, as well as the subtle change of spelling of new or unfamiliar words (e.g., names). Not the best but maybe slightly better.
  • craftinator 6y ago
    Not dyslexic, but I understand the symptoms fairly well after doing a couple research papers on it. In order to do a good simulation, I think there would need to be an eye movement sensor involved, so that when the eyes bounced back to a word to re-read it, corrected text could be swapped in. Do you think that would make a better sim?
    • shoes_for_thee 6y ago
      See, for example... when I first read this comment, I read: "Eye movement disorder involved," then I got to the bottom of the text, and re-read it correctly. This happens to me fairly often. Am I dyslexic?
      • linuxftw 6y ago
        This happens to me from time to time as well, not in this particular case. I think it's related to the fact that my mind has created a certain context, and I don't read with full attention. I will regularly skip over words unintentionally and "fill in the blanks". Sometimes I think this is an artifact of occasionally looking at groups of words as a single term. If I read each word deliberately, I don't encounter this problem. From my understanding of dyslexia, this is not it.
    • chrononaut 6y ago
      Actually yeah, that sounds a lot better. You're right, if there's no eye movement tracking, people who are not dyslexic would immediately stumble on the text.
• shoes_for_thee 6y ago
  I've noticed this happening to me a few times per day. I've noticed it more in the last few months than at any other time in my life... What's the frequency with which a dyslexic person experiences this? ....... from my other comment: See, for example... when I first read this comment, I read: "Eye movement disorder involved," then I got to the bottom of the text, and re-read it (eye movement sensor) correctly. This happens to me fairly often. Am I dyslexic? ... This is getting really common for me. I'll read a sentence in a way that makes perfect sense, then go back, re-read it, and discover I misread one of the words. It's frustrating because I don't have any indication something is amiss. Is this abnormal?
  • staticassertion 6y ago
    That does seem abnormal, you should see a doctor.
• epanchin 6y ago
  Serious question; how do you know this is an exaggeration? I would assume you have no way of knowing what this site looks like to non-dyslexics, as you are effectively overlaying real dyslexia on top of simulated. Like looking at a painting of an acid trip while actually on acid, you’d have no idea whether it was representative or not. I don’t understand how it would be possible to ever replicate it though, unless someone could be cured and then judge it’s realism. I understood this site to be replicating the reading experience, rather than a literal reflection of what you see.
  • SteveGoob 6y ago
    Through concentration and compensation skills we've acquired over the years, some dyslexic people can read _almost_ normally. At least, that was the case for me. If I really mentally exert, I can often force myself to read fluidly and read almost as if proficient. The problem is that it is costly to do so and highly conditional. For example: Doing reading comprehension tests in school, I would often perform well, if not a bit slowly. Given a book report, however, I would not be able to keep up such effort for very long; reading that way was very strenuous. Furthermore, when tasked with reading out loud, I slow to a crawl, begin to stutter, and translate inaccurately. Anyways, my point is that, we can sometimes read normally, it can just be extra difficult. As for this example specifically, I can't speak to its authenticity since I don't have the "moving characters" symptoms. My issues mostly revolve around poor eye tracking.